Chess puzzles and progress

Press, 7 April 1979, Page 17

Chess puzzles and progress

Chess Puzzle Book. By Leonard Barden. Faber. 148 pp $5. Better Chess for Average Players. By T. D. Harding. Oxford. 237 pp. . $7.80. > . (Reviewed by Vernon Small) When someone outside the experts’ publishing house, Batsford, issues a Chess book, there is every likelihood that it will be a popular book aimed at a wide audience. So it is with Leonard Barden’s “Chess Puzzle Book” which contains ”00 puzzles and solutions ranging from simple mates, to positional play, to party tricks. This last section is likely to be a disappointment to those who like to entertain an audience with problems that have a bizarre solution, since the contents are fairly pedestrian. Generally, the problems (as their source as daily problems in the London “Evening Standard” would suggest) are more for the player who is a casual solver, than for the real problem afficionados. Most examples dome from actual play, and lack the Wit and surprise that problem composers can provide. In chess problems, fact is rarely stranger than fiction. ; An annoying number of references I

to English personalities and tournaments may be a drawback for the New Zealand reader, but this is not a fault unique to this book. A good book of the “for a journey” genre. By contrast, “Better Chess for Average Players” is a much weightier book. In the past, Harding has tended to concentrate on highly specialised opening books, but since he is not in the top echelon of players his contribution has been limited to research and summary, rather than in analysis and innovation. With this book he achieves a much greater creative success.

Using the insights he gained from a three-year appointment as chess tutor with the Inner London Education Authority, the author attempts to improve the play of the player who has played some chess, but has never really studied the game. Although he purports to aim his efforts at the “average” player, a great increase in strength is obviously envisaged while reading the book. From the basic lessons of material values and simple combinative elements of chapter one, the student graduates to analysis and judgment of complications, all within less than 250 pages. To read the book from end to end

and to hope to achieve such a standard by the last page would be wildly optimistic. As a companion to improvement absorbed by the slow assimilation of the lessons, it would be an extremely useful work. Used in this way, it should be one of the best books of its type available, ranking with, but not aimed at such an exalted audience as A. Kotov’s “Think Like a Grandmaster.” 1 would imagine (and this may well have been the author’s chief intention) that, laid out as it is in exercises, school teachers and others taking groups would find this a most worthwhile book.