Quick book reviews March 13 2018

The above picture is the chess set given to me by my In-laws. Apparently they picked this set while traveling through Spain. My Father-in-law used to love playing chess, but doesn't play anymore (Alzheimer's). The pieces are hand carved (and much lighter than you would expect them to be), the base is pure wood with a ceramic overlay. 

I grabbed two books from my library, the first is The Chess Doctor by Bruce Pandolfini. I wanted to like this book and I honestly tried, but I did not see anything written that was not already mentioned on chess.com and other books. Control the center, keep the Knights from the edge of the board, look for pins or skewers. Those sort of suggestions. I will pick it up again when I get more experience. At the time of writing it I would give the book 7 out of 10, with the caveat for a future review. 

The second book was Checkmate Tactics by Garry Kasparov. This book I enjoyed better as the colors and layout made for easy reading. The book is a beginner to a beginner-intermediate level with plenty of practice scenarios to test your knowledge. My only complaint is the lack of chess coordinates on the example chessboards. Finding chess coordinates is not instinctual to me yet, so the constant counting files or rows was distracting. I do have a good bias towards Garry and his games, so my rating may be a bitter higher than others - 8.5 out of 10

Lastly here are the people I am playing this week, please feel free to reach out and challenge them:

Mathiesh (as always)

Grayglob

Sila2008

HegctreFitz608 (my friend's son and new to chess)

Javios

Miarych