Saturday, August 23, 2014

1001 Winning Chess Sacrifices and Combinations by Fred Reinfeld


    

     This is tactics a workbook with puzzles broken down by motif with a brief explanation on their mechanics. Unfortunately this reprint has not corrected Reinfeld’s analysis with the help of an engine. Some of Reinfeld’s solutions are not only inaccurate but they lead to the wrong result! I can’t imagine why the publishers would not correct this because publishing a book with known wrong solutions and inaccurate analysis cannot be of any value to the aspiring player.
      The book is in the old descriptive notation, but as I have repeatedly pointed out, this should not deter you from taking advantage of many excellent reprints in descriptive notation; you can learn it in a few minutes and if you do have trouble with it, simply print out a ‘cheat sheet’ until you become proficient.
      Another aggravation is the solutions are in the back of the book which I suppose saves space, but it’s a pain to have to find them. While you can easily carry this book around in your coat pocket, I would recommend checking the solutions with an engine. I checked a couple of sites (for example, Ossimitz and Lars Balzer) hoping the positions contained in this book would be available, but no luck. In the end, since this book, which is supposed to be instructional, can’t be recommended seeing that about 25 percent of the solutions are wrong.