Tactic Books

Tactics are one of the most important aspects of chess. Seeing tactics and exploiting them is an effective way to get wins.

Peter Romanovsky

Chess Middlegame Combinations

The book to learn how to make moves with positional plans and combinational ideas in mind.

Recommended by:

Daniel Naroditsky

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One book that I can recommend is called Chess Middlegame Combinations by Peter Romanovsky. Romanovsky was a early 20th century chess master and a wrote a fantastic book on seeing tactics.

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László Polgár

Chess: 5334 Problems, Combinations and Games

Never miss a checkmate tactic again. With over 3000 checkmate in two problems and 700 mate in three problems.

Recommended by:

Daniel Naroditsky

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One resource that I can recommend if you're having trouble with basic mates: Laszlo Polgar issued a huge anthology of mating puzzles. It's an amazing resource, it is mates in one two and three in great numbers. If you're serious about training you can sit down and do 10-15 of those a day for two months and you're going to greatly improve your mate-related pattern recognition.

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Ger van Perlo

Van Perlo's Endgame Tactics

This book is a classic and award winning book about tactics in the endgame.

Recommended by:

Daniel Naroditsky

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There's a very famous book called "Van Perlo's Endgame Tactics". Van Perlo is a correspondence player who compiled, I would even go so far as to thousands of instances of attacks, checkmates and tactics in the endgame.

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Why buy a tactics book?

Why should I even buy a tactics book when I can play thousands of tactics online (for example on this site :))?

Most tactics books do not simply list tactics and give the solution. They explain the background, point out important considerations and hopefully explain the solutions in a comprehensible way.

I also think that you get more involved in the tactics when you solve them in a book. Online, if you don’t see the exact solution, you often quickly play the move that comes to mind, regardless of whether you have seen all the way to the end or not. Offline, with a book, you are not as exposed to this temptation.

More book lists

Looking for something more specific? Take a look at these book lists:

• Most Grandmaster recommended books (20 books)
• Tactic Books (3 books)
• Books featured in "The Queens Gambit" (4 books)
• Attacking Chess Books (2 books)
• Defensive Chess Books (2 books)
• The Best Endgame Books (7 books)
• The Best Positional Chess Books (3 books)