Practicing tactics is an extremely important part of training to be a better chess player. These mostly occur in the middle game when patzers like myself wonder what just happened to our position and/or our pieces! The ability to quickly recognize tactical opportunities will greatly improve your game and your rating. As such, it would be nice if there was software out there to help improve this part of your game. Well, rest assured, there is tons of it. One of the best is called Intensive Course Tactics by George Renko. This training CD offers over 4,000 tactical positions classified by themes. That is correct, over 4,000! Themes include such tactics as forks, pins, zugzwang, win of time, deflection and many many others for a total of 120 databases worth of training. But what I like best about the CD is the no-nonsense approach to training. There are not long pages of text to read - in fact, there aren’t even short pages of text to read. Renko has chosen the pedagogical strategy that we learn by doing and thus has the user dive right into the fray. When you choose a theme and load a position Renko typically gives you a couple of examples to play through to demonstrate the idea and then the fun really begins. When you load the next game you are suddenly faced with a clock counting down and the understated but pressure filled line, “please enter a move for white” (or black depending upon the scenario). You job is to come up with the best move for the current position within the time allotted - not much unlike a real game, eh? And speaking of real games, most of the positions in the databases are not canned or odd ‘puzzle’ positions but actually come from real games played by various players over the years. So, at the time, they had to make the same decision you are faced with now. What if you choose the wrong move? The program tells you and gives you the option to try again or see the solution. The program also keeps score - each time you make a wrong choice your score decreases. This also makes it an excellent program for a chess coach to use to track the progress of his/her students. This isn’t a CD you would sit down and run through all at once - how could you with over 4,000 postions? But rather one you can use over and over in small increments to practice and hone your skills. It can be especially helpful before tournaments, for example.
What do you need to run the CD? The good news is that it comes with the free Chessbase Reader so everything you need is contained on the CD. However, if you have one of the Fritz playing programs (Fritz, Junior, Shredder etc…) you can also run the CD in one of those programs without installing the Chessbase Reader.
Overall, I highly recommend this training CD for any player but especially those that struggle sometimes in coming up with a plan (like me). The only downside I really see is that, since it is on a computer, it is in two dimensions. You will have to work to translate you ability to see tactics on the computer to the actual 3-D chess board. Of course, you can always setup the positions on the chess board before you try to solve them. And the huge amount of practice you can accomplish with the CD more than makes up for the 2-D dilemma. This program will improve your chess game.
Until next time….
Tom Fleetwood