Fra forfatterens forord

Spending as little as 10-15 minutes a day on one’s tactical ability really can reap dividends. I can certainly testify to that myself and it’s always very welcome to see a pupil regularly trying to solve a number of tactical exercises: not only do they become more tactically alert, but they also improve their clock handling and gain in confidence.

That’s what I wrote at the start of The Complete Chess Workout in 2007 and it’s something I most certainly still believe. Back then after months of studying the output of innumerable database searches to compile 1200 puzzles, I vowed never again to produce a tactics book, but times change and the gentle, constant probing from friends and readers for a follow-up work caused me to go back into the laboratory as it were.

Since the start of the year I’ve been noting down interesting positions every time I’ve followed a tournament or studied the latest games in an opening variation. That does not, however, produce anywhere near 1200 positions, even allowing too for drawing heavily on my own games, as well as those of pupils and friends. Thus the summer has been largely dominated by not only running searches and then sifting through the results for all the key tactical motifs which the club player must be aware of, like Íxh7+, but also much lesser known combinational ideas, such as ...Îxe5, which should improve readers’ calculation skills while ideally helping them become more creative in their own games.

Well into this project a highly interesting work, Greatest 365 Puzzles, by Csaba Balogh appeared, drawing solely on games from the first four months of 2012. I’ve certainly enjoyed solving some of those, but in case any strong club players have purchased that work as well as this, I did remove several puzzles. The two works now have fewer than 20 positions in common; ones which were so rare, instructive or just plain beautiful that I could hardly leave them out. Likewise, knowing too that many English readers subscribe to CHESS and solve the many puzzles presented monthly in that magazine, I’ve again tried to keep the number of recent positions in common with that publication to well under two dozen. Nobody likes to solve a position from a very well-known game more than once, unless it’s extremely challenging, but finding several, say, Îxg7+ sacrifices in this work should help to mean that you never miss that motif again in your own games.