303 Perplexing Chess Puzzles

by Bruce Alberston and Fred Wilson

Book Overview

Building on the earlier "303 Tactical Chess Puzzles," this collection of fun chess exercises provides a rigorous practice regimen designed to develop players' strategic abilities. One hundred... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1402711468
• ISBN13: 9781402711466
• Release Date: November 2004
• Publisher: Sterling
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.5" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

An excellent tactics studybook

What makes this book (and others in the same series) different from most tactics / puzzle books, is the puzzles are arranged by difficulty not by tactical motif. In my opinion this makes much much more sense. There are three sets of problems, each containing 101. The first is for the Advanced Beginning, the second for the Intermediate Player, and the third for the Tournament Player. How to proceed is very obvious: first work through the first set, then either repeat it or continue to the next. This method or working through a set of tactical problems of increasing difficulty and then repeating it (7 times to be exact) is the method advocated by "Rapid Chess Improvement". Other puzzle books in which problem difficulty seems to be random are extremely annoying to me, since I obviously need to practice the easier ones before moving on to the hard ones!

Good tactics practice

This is the first chess puzzle book I've tried to work my way through, so I don't know how to compare it to others. but I have found it useful so far. It is essentially 100% positions and solutions, with very little explanatory text, but the puzzles themselves seem appropriately graded, and I've only found one error in the solutions (a pretty good error rate from what I've heard about puzzle books). I'm not a very advanced player, so I find myself wishing for a bit more explanation in the solutions sometimes, but generally I can understand them. The book is divided into three sections based on difficulty, and for me, some of the puzzles in the first section were easy, some hard, but all more or less at my level. The other two sections, from the few puzzles I attempted in each, seem much more challenging.