Your Jungle Guide to Chess Tactics

Improve your tactical skills!

Pattern recognition is perhaps the most important thing in chess. This is true in all three phases of the game and applies to both positional and tactical themes. The book you have in your hands gives a sufficiently complete description of the latter. The main objective of this book is aimed at improving pattern recognition and tactical vision, while treating the reader with pleasant combinations.

This book consists of two pieces. The first 17 chapters elaborate on the most important motifs in practical chess. The remaining 8 chapters show the art of attack and defense. Certain motifs feel as if they are together and the order of the chapters in which they are discussed reflects this. The 25 chapters of this book begin with an introduction that is always designed to illustrate clearly the subject matter. Most of the games here, but not all, are classics. All presentations are followed by training quizzes to reinforce pattern recognition and learning from what has been previously discussed.

It should be emphasized that motifs in chess are interwoven and it is the rarest occasion in practical games when only one motif is present. Often even a single movement has multiple motifs and the one we're studying depends on which aspect of the movement we're looking at. It wasn't an easy feat to order the riddles properly. So the approach I took in ordering the puzzles was to decide which theme or motif best characterizes the tactic. The total number of training quizzes is 365, one for each day of the calendar year. They're all real games and most of them GM practice. This should give the book a more practical value. In some of the games, the player found the solution, while in others the combination was lost.

With the training quizzes, I put a lot of emphasis on being original. This means that during my research, I primarily collected riddles from recent games and at the same time incorporated tactics from my own practice. There are also a number of combinations of my friends' games that I'm immensely grateful they shared with me.