This Week at ChessCafe.com: Critical Moments

To make sure you receive these e-mails in your Inbox (and not a junk folder), please add "info@chesscafe.com" to your address book or safe sender list. This week's coupon code is "hellsten50". See below for details... Sale ends Tuesday, September 21, 2010. Enjoy great savings on these select products and more: 101 Chess Questions Answered Chess Mazes Chess Workbook for Children Fritz and Chesster Learn to Play Chess, Part 2 Olympian Basic Combo Teach Yourself Visually Chess This Week at ChessCafe.com Old Riddle Karsten Mueller examines an old riddle by famous artist Marcel Duchamp. Learning to Walk This column is designed to help anyone improve their chess play. Arbiter's Notebook Does a player forfeit his right to a win if he claims a draw? Retrospective Notes by Bent Larsen from Chess Informant. Critical Moments A book you have to take a lot of time with to get the maximum benefit. Game of the Week The Nor'easters remain undefeated in Week Three action. Chess Legend The game Robatsch - Larsen, Halle 1963 is featured. Book Notes Winning Chess Puzzles For Kids Vol. 2 is a fun and instructive workbook for children ages 7 to 13. Full of imaginative drawings, it combines standard chess problems with a variety of insightful chess-related puzzles. Slightly more advanced than Volume 1, its aim is to further develop a student's tactical skills. The main part of the book consists of exercise sheets with more than 1000 positions, covering basic mates and simple tactics such as forks, pins, and discovered checks. There are also 100 pages of additional material with names like Lily's Puzzlers, Switcheroos, Who's The Goof, Chess Mazes, and Double Whammies. This book can be studied by itself or used as a supplement to the author's earlier works: Winning Chess Strategy For Kids and Winning Chess Exercises For Kids. Taken together, they make a complete course of instruction for the aspiring player. Purchase all four Winning Chess volumes by Jeff Coakley and automatically save an extra $10.00! Tricks and traps, especially in the opening, are a dangerous reality of competitive chess. A knowledge of such ideas is essential if a player wants to be the hunter rather than the victim. On this DVD Davies presents a variety of tricks and traps that can arise after 1.e4 by White.      We are pleased to offer ChessCafe.com customers the opportunity to save fifty percent off suggested retail price on the book Play the Sicilian Kan by Johann Hellsten. Simply add the book to your shopping cart, along with Play the Sicilian Kan (Ebook) and, during the checkout process, enter the coupon code "hellsten50" (without the quotes) to receive a fifty percent discount from suggested retail price! This offer expires September 21, 2010 or while supplies last. Weekly Puzzle Quote of the Week White to Move/Solution Below Chess is a game of continuous decision-making. Amatzia Avni Surprise in Chess Reviews in Brief Critical Moments in Chess by Paata Gaprindashvili Paata Gaprindashvili established himself as an author of note with Imagination in Chess, his first book. A very good book, it was however short on explanatory material and long on exercises. The explanatory information in that book was quite good despite its brevity, however, and I would have liked to have seen more of it. It ended up being mostly a tactics book with some nice explanations of things like reciprocal thinking (reversing the move order of a combination), but a book that definitely is valuable to improving one's chess thinking. Critical Moments is a similar book. Fifty-nine pages of good, solid introductory material and then 207 pages of exercises, with 269 exercises in all. As a compensation for the short introduction, the exercises are all well-annotated. As an interesting aside, I note one on-line reviewer has noted that he thinks this book is best used after Soltis's Studying Chess Made Easy, a book I reviewed here earlier. The rationale? Soltis tells you how to study but has almost no study material, making Gaprindashvili, in that reviewers' eyes, an ideal follow-up. I am intrigued by the comparison, but find it lacking in that the exercises, for the most part, in Gaprindashvili's text are often very difficult and require a lot of attention and time. It seems a bit of a quantum leap, and Bill Brock, a Chicago area expert/master, has recommended as an introductory tome to Imagination Beim's How to Calculate Chess Tactics as an intermediary text; I would make the same recommendation here. The book is listed by Batsford as a book for the club player; I think that club player would have to be a very serious one, one willing to invest a lot of time doing the exercises as I don't see how anyone, even the quickest study, could get a full benefit out of Critical Moments without at least three months of time to invest at an hour or so a day. Read the full review here. New Catalog Additions 1-877-91-CHESS 9/15 Play the Sicilian Kan (Ebook) 9/15 Starting Out: The Reti (Ebook) 9/8 Kasparov on Modern Chess, Part 4 (Hardcover) 9/4 Checkmate Tactics (Hardcover) 9/3 Davies: Tricks & Traps Vol. 1 (DVD) 9/2 Chess Words of Wisdom 9/1 Killer French Defence, Part Two (DVD) 9/1 Killer French Defence, Part One (DVD) 8/30 Foxy Openings Volume 110: Modern Defence, Part Three (DVD) 8/30 Foxy Openings Volume 109: Modern Defence, Part Two (DVD) 8/30 Foxy Openings Volume 108: Modern Defence, Part One (DVD) 8/29 Foxy Openings Volume 107: Beating the Queen's Gambit with the Semi-Slav (DVD) 8/28 Foxy Openings Volume 106: 1.b4 The Sokolsky (DVD) 8/28 Roman's Lab: Vol. 99, Simple Way To Play Against Slav Systems (DVD) 8/27 How to Win at Chess - Quickly! (Ebook) 8/26 New In Chess Yearbook #95 8/25 The Secret to Chess (DVD) 8/24 Power Play 14: Test Your Tactics (DVD) 8/23 Roman's Lab: Vol. 95, Instructive Games for the Scandinavian Player (DVD) 8/23 Roman's Lab: Vol. 94, Instructive Games for the Reti Player (DVD) 8/23 Roman's Lab: Vol. 93, Instructive Games for the English Player (DVD) 8/21 The Ruy Lopez Main Line (restock) 8/20 Total Chess Training I (Clearance) 8/19 Quality Chess Puzzle Book 8/19 Quality Chess Puzzle Book (Hardcover) 8/18 The Cutting Edge 1: The Open Sicilian 1 8/17 The Alterman Gambit Guide: White Gambits 8/16 Soviet Chess Strategy 8/16 Soviet Chess Strategy (Hardcover) 8/15 Boost your Chess 2: Beyond the Basics 8/15 Boost your Chess 2: Beyond the Basics (Hardcover) Puzzle Answer: 28.d6! cxd6 29.Nd5 Qg7 30.Nf6+ Kh8 31.Ne8 1-0 After 31...Qh6 32.Qf8+ Qxf8 33.Rxf8+ Kh7 34.Nxd6 Black loses the bishop. Yusupov-Correa, Mendoza 1985 (Source: Critical Moments in Chess) Copyright 2010 BrainGamz, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 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