Just hear the names of the things you are about to learn and you know this is an intellectual candy store. Pins, forks, skewers, deflections, interceptions and the mysterious zwischenzug – all waiting to be revealed and mastered by you.

The only thing you need is the right teacher and Littlewood is definitely that teacher. The best feature in Littlwood’s book is how he builds every chapter and the right balance he holds between his explanations and the exercises for the reader. But before we get to how every chapter is built, let us see the exact contents of the book. The book is divided to the following fifteen chapters:

1 Pins

2 Skewers

3 Double Attack

4 Discovered Attack

5 Back Rank Combinations

6 Overloading

7 Deflection

8 Decoying

9 Removal of Defence

10 Interception

11 Space Clearance

12 The Zwischenzug

13 Pawn Promotion

14 Draw

15 Miscellaneous Problems

The last chapter is a summarizing self test where you have twenty positions to solve without the author telling you which position belongs to which theme. This last chapter gives you a good orientation about how much you (hopefully) learnt from the previous fourteen chapters. The first chapters are ordered from easier themes to more complicated ones so I would advise to learn this book in its original order. Each chapter starts with a “Definition and Examples” section where Littlewood defines the theme and then gives 5-6 very simple examples. Loyal to his belief that chess is not a sport or an art but “a battle” Littlewood draws his definitions from analogies to real war strategies. I found this somewhat disturbing because for me chess is a game and not some form of “war”. Still, the author’s examples are always so lucid and instructive that you can just skip his definition and understand what a “pin” or a “decoy” is straight from the examples.

The second part of each chapter is titled “Exploitation” and this is where Littlewood puts the more complicated examples, usually drawn from grandmasters’ practice. By “complicated” I mean relatively complicated. These examples are usually two or three movers and even the beginner can follow them. However, the most important feature of the examples is that they are simply beautiful. No wonder that this book has been reprinted despite the abundance of new books on chess tactics; it is a fun book to read.

The third part of every chapter is titled “Defending Against… (name of the theme)”. This is where Littlwood gives you tips that will help you avoid being on the wrong side of the right chess tactic. This is a useful feature that is unfortunately missing from many other works on chess tactics. Every chapter ends with ten exercise positions that go, as you may have guessed, in an ascending order of difficulty.

To give you a notion of the level of players that this book is aimed for, here are three examples from the seventh chapter, the one on deflection (all three solutions are at the bottom of this page):

This is the first exercise. The text goes “How can White deflect the Black rook and so queen his pawn?”

After you read the chapter, this position should really be an easy one for you to solve.

The fifth exercise:

“Spanier – Lorenz, Hanover 1965

The White queen is the key defensive piece. How did Black deflect it and so win the game?”

Even the tenth is not extremely difficult but the aesthetic effect is impressive.

Galier – Hermann, West Germany 1965

“White seems to be in desperate straits. However, a brilliant deflection sequence leads to the win. How did he do it?”

The Good Things:

• A good cover of all basic tactics of the middlegame

• Loads of exercises (307 positions)

• Inspiring beautiful examples

• The chapters are built efficiently

The Bad Things:

• Uses military jargon which is, at times, too aggressive
• Not an “all in one” book for the beginner, only tactics

Quote: “The alarm bells should begin ringing when one of your own pieces becomes too important to your defences. If at this point you fail to take some safeguarding action you will soon find your position ruined by an overloading tactic.”

The Bottom Line: A great first tactics book for beginners and would also work as an exercise book for intermediate players.

Rating:  9/10 

Review written by Chessbug.

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