Coffeehouse Chess Tactics - Book Review
Coffeehouse Chess Tactics is a tactics book by John Healy, author of The Green Arena. It is a mixture of prose on tournament play, examples of beautiful tactics, mates, and traps, along with examples along set themes.
The book is not a comprehensive tactics trainer by a grandmaster. It's not a replacement for John Nunn's Chess Puzzle Book, or a Reinfeld 1001 book. CCT is an examination of the everyday club player's run in with tactics played under time pressure with noise all around, a portfolio of swindles and beautiful moves. It's a few hours with all the things that make chess wonderful. It's a simplistic, stripped-down lecture on why chess is such a wonderfully powerful drug.
Because it isn't a grandmasterly step-by-step analysis of how tactics work, full of twenty-move variations, it comes across as far more honest to the average player. A few quick variations on the examples, sometimes only two moves deep, is exactly what the club or tournament player would be looking at. The beginner, just playing his first few competitive games, will therefore find the book a treat to be spoken to with no pretension, no complexity, just easy to understand tactics.
It's possible that those looking for a comprehensive puzzle book of endless tactics may be disappointed by the book, as there are only perhaps 100 examples. However, a quick flick through it before a tournament, again, for the average joe, is always going to spark some beautiful ideas off in the mind that you'll be looking for in your own games. And this, I think, is the key point of CCT. It isn't a study, but a platter. It's a display case that you browse through every so often and come to the board and go 'wouldn't it be great if I could do something like Healy did in that book?' Don't take it too seriously, don't think of it as a training tool. Treat it as a chess novel, something to snuggle up with of a rainy afternoon and browse though with a smile on your lips, and you'll find it much more approachable, and enjoyable.
Rating: 7/10
