1001 Chess Exercises for Beginners: The Tactics Workbook that Explains the Basic Concepts, Too

The media could not be loaded. This book has a lot of different chess puzzles, and it’s been really helpful for improving my skills. The exercises cover many important tactics like pins, forks, checkmates, promotions, and more.

The media could not be loaded. I picked this up for my son who is 8 years old. He joined chess club at school and the teacher recommended this book to help him progress. My son has been reading through it and been practicing some of the strategies and moves and seems to understand it and like it.

I am a class B player who used this book to broaden my knowledge of short, simple tactical motifs, and to improve my ability to quickly recognize these simple motifs through repetition in practice. Most of the exercises in the first half of the book were much too simple for a class B player, but the exercises in the latter half of the book required a little thought, on the order of 5 to 15 seconds to solve. None of the exercises in this book were overly challenging to me, but I saw some new (to me) and somewhat tricky tactical patterns. One thing I particularly liked about the book was the wide variety of tactical motifs presented and the amount of repetition of these motifs (enough repetition to make the concept stick, but not too much so as to bore the reader). This book is probably too basic for a class B player, but I did get the practice I wanted and it took very little time to complete the book.I generally agree with the points made by Mr. Falter, who does a good job of accurately describing the contents of the book and its virtues. I give this book 5 stars because (1) it contains 1001 accurate tactical exercises, appropriately arranged by category and order of difficulty; and (2) a wide range of tactical motifs are presented with an appropriate amount of repetition. This book would be very useful tactics practice for beginning to low-intermediate chessplayers.

Fantastic book that really does a good job of explaining tactics, and it's enjoyable to think through all the different exercises.However, I STRONGLY recommend you buy the paperback version and NOT the Kindle. The Kindle version I have did not include any of the tactic explanation sections; it just has the exercises, so you don't really know what you're supposed to learn. Plus, the chess move notation they use is very confusing when in Kindle format. But, all of that is much better in the paperback, which explains all the tactics and has an easier-to-understand way of showing the move notations.I would also say that, while this is for beginners, it's not for people just beginning chess. It seems like it's for people who have played quite a few games and are looking to hone their tactics to progress to intermediate, rather than someone who is just learning the fundamentals of the game. If you have not actually played much chess already, or don't have a firm grasp of the rules and piece movement basics, this isn't for you.

This book was recommended by a US grand master on one of his Youtube videos. It's 1001 different pictures of chess boards at the end game; you have to figure out how to "win in one move", "win in two moves", etc. The answers are at the end. My wife and I are new to chess and this fun book of exercises has done a lot to help us begin to understand chess strategy. Many of the exercises are very difficult for real beginners like us, but the more we get into the book, the more we understand what we are looking at. It's a really fun way to learn chess strategy. The book suggests laying out the pieces for each exercise on a real chess board. We absolutely agree that this is a must; there's no way we could spot the answers just looking at the pictures.

Many exercises. It has hints and answers. Straightforward practical exercises. Whoever created all of these exercises, Thank you so much.

Great book that progressively gives you harder chess problems as you advance in the book. Helps you stop and study positions to learn tacics and interactions between pieces

I like this book, and I am working through it again right now. There are, however, a few problems. 1. There are puzzles that have alternate solutions not provided by the answer key. 2. A couple of the solutions provided are not the top engine move. 3. At least one puzzle is mis-categorized.Alternate Solutions: After solving one of the puzzles, I couldn't figure out why my solution was wrong. After wracking my brain, I finally plugged the position into Stockfish; it turns out my solution was correct also. I have found a total of 8 puzzles like this; 4 of them were mates in 3, and 3 of them were mates in 4. One of them, inexplicably, was from "The missing piece" section, which is a unique section, created by the authors. One would think they would carefully check these puzzles. It is not the end of the world, if there are a very limited number of puzzles that have an alternate solution, esp. if you know where they are. The problem, however, is that one may start to second guess the answer key frequently and spend an inordinate amount of time double checking the solutions with the engine.Not top engine moves: So far, I have only found two puzzles that provided a solution that was not the top engine move, but in one case, Stockfish evaluated the answer key move as 2.5 pawns worse than the top engine move. That's unacceptable.Mis-categorized puzzle: The skewer section contains a puzzle whose solution involves a pin, not a skewer. This has nothing to do with engine analysis, and makes one question whether the authors really understand the difference between a pin and a skewer.Bottom line: This is a nice collection of puzzles including a variety of tactical motifs. The book would be much improved, however, if all of the solutions were verified with an engine. If the problems I mentioned here were fixed, this could be a 5 star book. I own the book, and I still use it, but if I was looking to purchase a first tactical puzzle book, I would probably look for one that has been engine checked.