Writing Tactic Chess Book!

Hello fellow chess buddies!

I am a high school senior, who has to complete a senior project as part of the districts graduation requirements. A senior project is a specific project, chosen by the senior, that is meant to inspire the student to pursue a future career pertaining to their completed project.

I am only a 17 year old high school student, but I have this idea to write a chess tactic book!! A little back ground info, I am a national, state and regional chess champion with an ELO rating of 1400 so I feel I would be qualified enough to write a chess tactic book. I need your feedback to if I should write this book. THANKS

Why don't you start by posting just one tactic here that you think is interesting as a puzzle?

You can use the game editor (the chessboard icon on the top left of the text box) to create it and then you can edit it if necessary. Since you have played the tactics trainer here a fair amount, you should have a reasonable idea of what kinds of things to post.

I don't think I understand what you are getting at. For my senior project I have to come out of the project with something to show the committe board. 

If you are going to write a book of tactics, don't you have to write down tactics problems?  

Why not test them out here? You might write them out on your word processor but the testers here will tell you if you have set a good problem and whether or not you have made any mistakes.

As a teacher, I think this is an interesting idea. As a chess player, I would be inclined to say you may be a bit over your head trying to write a book of tactics puzzles that are solid and won't be torn down by seasoned chess players.

Perhaps you can change your goal slightly.

If you want to do tactics puzzles, perhaps you might stick to simple puzzles meant to build basic tactical skills. For each puzzle or puzzle type, do a move by move analysis of the moves. Start with 1 move mates and move up to 3 move mates.

Then arrange them in a way that exercises the player so they can learn these basic positions by the end of the book.

Hello Dporth,

Don't listen to these negative posts! I think your idea is great! Perhaps you could use some of your games for inspiration and write about you experiences as filler between the groups of puzzles or illustrations. You sound like a smart person, so trust your instincts on this. Have fun!!

You can post some of the project for feedback!

That's right teacher, lets tell our kids to set their goals lower. I am glad the great men of this world didn't have you for a teacher. We would be reading by candle light and we would not be playing chess online.

This is actually how chess teachers say tactics should be taught; get the basic positions down to the point you don't have to think about them. Trying to make a book full of solid puzzles could take years unless you copy puzzles.

Despite what jkborders seems to think, a tactics primer like I described above would be more of a challenge for you than putting together a book of tactics puzzles.

Let say you sat down in front of your computer for hours and hours studying games for tactical ideas or setting-up positions for your book. This is fine, but you've just spent hours working within your 'comfort zone' to produce something that only serious chess players could appreciate.

Now, lets say, instead, you sit down and write a tactic primer with the goal to help weaker players improve their tactical skills. In this case, you would be spending more of your time taking your knowledg and understanding of tactics and finding a way to express them so that others can directly obtain the knowledge you have. I think something like this would be more impressive to your teachers as it shows the ability to directly pass your knowledge and expertise onto others(teaching).

I think it's a cool idea regardless if it's practical for your chess studies.  Go through some annotated games, they usually have "what if" scenarios that include tactical refutations of ideas.  You can use that as a template.

Are there copyright issues if I were to use a chess.com tactic or a tactic from someone's played game?

No, for the simple reason that it's impossible for anyone to prove beyond doubt that they were the first to play or invent a particular tactic in a particular position.

It may be a different matter if you include exactly the same variations and annotations used in a book or on a website, as these annotations could be the copyright property of the original author. But simple copy and paste isn't writing a book anyway.

PS you say you're a National Champion, with an ELO of 1400 ... ???

Oh, so your plan is to copy the puzzles and turn them in as your own work?

Something you may find interesting is to pick a very specific tactic and then use a database to find examples through "chess history" and perhaps show the prevelance of the tactic by decade and examples from key historic games.  

You could look at examples of wins with the tactic and losses with the tactic and try to draw some conclusions about what is necessary in the position for the tactic to work and common mistakes players have made when it failed.

I think this may allow you to go into more depth rather than breadth and really dig your teeth into the topic.  It may provide you with a better foundation for a school project (and also be interesting to research).

To spice up the discussion of the historical element, you could point out other key historical events that may have been taking place at the same time as the tournaments/games you used for examples.

"Greek Gift" Bishop Sacs on h7 Through the Decades

Something else that might be interesting is to focus on mates.  Pick a number of classic mating patterns, show examples, discuss what is necessary for them to work.  Then show the trends for each through chess history - what mates used to be most common and what are most common today?  I could see a graph plotting frequency of each type of mate by decade for example as a percentage of games in your database by decade).

hmmmm....or maybe focus on Stalemates!  That is not discussed as much in the books and may make for an interesting project with a unique spin.  I wonder if there even is a taxonomy of stalemates like there is for mates.