Book review: 1001 Chess Exercises for Beginners (Masetti & Messa, 2012)

Introduction

1001 Chess Exercises for Beginners (Masetti & Messa, 2012) is a collection of tactical puzzles. The positions are grouped by tactical motifs (pin, discovered attack, and so on), but the book also presents mixed motifs and mate puzzles. Under each puzzle, there is a small (or not-so-small) hint, like "Apparent defence"; "Time to get close"; "The long diagonal"; "A crucial defender goes".

The name is a slight misnomer — I wouldn't recommend it to literal beginners — but it should be appropriate for people over 1400 Lichess rapid, and is certainly a good first puzzle book to get. Players up to 2000 Lichess rapid can certainly get good use out of it, but from there the book's value peters out, as most puzzles will be trivial for players much stronger than that.

You can find some sample mate-in-one exercises on the book's Amazon page.

The good

1001 positions (which seems to be something of a standard number nowadays for puzzle books) is a lot of solving. You can easily go through the book twice or thrice without great diminishing returns, so you can count on this book serving your puzzle-solving needs for a long while. Puzzle books in general are a ridiculously good investment for chess improvement, and the bang-to-buck ratio is looking good here.

The puzzles are generally well-selected, and seem to reinforce common and useful motifs and provide a good amount of variation within them. The book starts with some fairly simple mate-in-one and mate-in-two puzzles (186 in total), which serves as a neat introduction to mating motifs in addition to the later chapters that focus more on the winning of material.

The hint system is quite a good idea, and the clues are generally not patronizingly easy. They allow you to find solutions for puzzles that might have stumped you otherwise, in the same way that grouping puzzles by tactical motifs present might.

Is this a good thing? Well, to some extent the function of a puzzle book is to expose your chess brain to tactical ideas to sink them into your intuition. Simply presenting the positions and their solutions all at once can work, but takes more self-discipline — and, quite importantly, our brains tend to learn through effort and mental strain, not passive observation. All of this is to say that a little bit of help on the way to the solution is not such a bad thing, but it might annoy people on the stronger end of the book's target audience.

There is a comparatively challenging collection of mate-in-threes (81 positions) and mate-in-fours (23 positions), and a healthy chunk of "mixed motifs" puzzles. There is also a small section where the reader is instructed to place a named piece on the board to achieve mate or the gain of material, which I found to be quite creative and refreshing.

As with other New in Chess books, the book's look, feel and cover are quite pleasant. It doesn't take up too much space (it is roughly a third[!] of the thickness of Nunn's 1001 Deadly Checkmates, for example), which it achieves by cramming 12 diagrams onto each page, and is conveniently portable.

The bad

There are some odd quality assurance slip-ups like erratic capitalization, spaces before exclamation points (Like This !), and the final text chapter of the book simply ending rather comically mid-sentence ("The use of tactics requires not only creativity and courage, but also prudent" [sic]). As far as I can tell, the issues are purely cosmectic, but I found them a bit annoying.

A couple of puzzles are very difficult compared with the others. It's not a huge deal if you don't expect yourself to solve everything perfectly, but sometimes I found myself asking "Wait, what is this doing here?".

This book certainly has some downsides for people who prefer puzzles to be mixed into one big pile with no help whatsoever, though almost a third of the book is dedicated to the "mixed motifs" sections. The hints are very difficult to avoid, though, and a better system probably should have been found.

On a slight tangent, I find this to be an infuriatingly common slip-up with chess literature — hide the damn spoilers! If you expect me to look at a position on my own, don't print the solution right under it (or preferably on the same spread at all...), and have the courtesy of letting me decide whether to use hints or not. There are fairly obvious solutions to these issues, and publishers for some reason refuse to implement them. Moving on...

The introductory texts for each chapter feel a bit perfunctory, and mostly consist of a page or three and some examples. The book does try to puff them up on both covers, but they really aren't much of an upside. If you want an excellent introduction text to tactical motifs and ideas, look up Chess Tactics from Scratch — this one's just a big pile of instructive puzzles, which is totally fine.

There is some calculation to do, but mostly this is a book for grinding pattern recognition. This is all well and good, but those seeking very in-depth calculation training from this book might be disappointed.

In conclusion...

1001 Chess Exercises for Beginners is a very good first puzzle book, and people well past the proper use of the term "beginner" can get some serious use out of it. The experience is slightly marred by abrupt difficulty spikes and lacking quality assurance, and the introductory texts aren't all that, but summa summarum the book is well worth its price tag.

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-Numerot