Sacrifice and Initiative in Chess: Seize the Moment to Get the Advantage

This is a very good book. But it is not one I would recommend to a beginer. Mainly dues to large analysis lines the author gives. This is a nice book for someone who has already gone theough My System, Art of Attack, and Chess Training for Post begginers. If you already comfortable with the topics in any of those three books, this is a nice book to use next, If you are new to positional Chess, I would stary with one of the other three books first. Just this week we had a tournament in my town and walking around seeing others play I quickly notice that there are players who had a better position but gave it up, or failed to take advantage of it. One person who was playing a higher rated opponent did not pick up the initive after the stronger player wasted two moves in the opening, instead he wasted two of his own. Another match a person had a plan, and the opponent decided to counter attack, yet the guy with the plan failed to ignore the counter attack not realizing his attack was superior and decisive. This person had a mate threat, or have his opponent lose a queen to stop the mate, yet he got fixated on the counter attack, and fixated on losing a pawn that he decided to postpone his attack and defend the pawn, i doing so his opponent spotted the mate threat and moved away from it. So this one person settled for a draw rather than a win. My point is that many people seem to get fixated on an idea or two and forget about the big picture. This book is rather refreshing in that it will illustrate the big picture, you will see games where you can ignore a person threat, when your threat is even bigger, it will show you why what looks like an obvious move to non masters, is often ignore by masters eg. a master/grand master not taking a hanging piece and making some positional move instead. The book will show you how you can maintain the iniative when you have it and discuss standard attack plans as well as understanding pawn structures. the book is basically an attacking manual similar, but not the same as Art of Attack, this book is more advance. I guess an analogy would be Art of Attack is to Pre-Calculus as Sacrifice and Initiative in Chess is to Calculus. Very good book, but not for a begginer, or someone not yet comfortable with any of the three books I mentioned earlier. The book can be used in several ways, the games are given to you from stary to the end, and then there will be a diagram with the key position. Before I read the book, I just went to the diagram sort of like the puzzle and see if I could figure out the move before reading the annotations, so my first week with the book I used it as a puzzle book, I later went back read the book and the analysis and played the games out on my pc. The analysis part is detailed and I recommend you use a computer or a chess board when looking at the alternatives lines discussed in the analysis section as well as the actual game. Again Excellent book for more advance players that enjoy playing aggressive games.

A must have for a improving player, and very intertaing.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. Just so you know a little about me, I am an avid chess player who constantly plays on the internet, my rating is currently 1724, I read a lot of niche chess books (i.e. not "My system", "1953 Zurich Tournament", "Secrets of Modern Chess Strategy" etc) & I don't use computer programs to analyse my games, I do the hard work myself. I highly recommend reading this chess book for any non-Grandmaster player who has already grasped the classical & modern principles of chess. One of the main issues that I have discovered from playing against amateurs is that the vast majority of them are passive in their playing style. This book has 92 games played at the Grandmaster level that will demonstrate ways to seize the initiative & as the author states a few times in this book, the sacrifice is the natural culmination of the initiative, or words to that effect. The 92 games that are covered are split into two parts & 16 chapters that are themed. These games were played by World Champions, Grandmasters & by the author, himself. Some people may not like that the author has selected so many of his own games, however this is a huge plus because who would know better than the players themselves in regards to what variations & ideas were thought about during their own games? About 20% of these games I had already covered a number of times in other chess books, but that is the problem with classic/immortal games, it is hard to overlook them if you are writing a book in which they are prefect examples to illustrate your point(s). I found that in more or less the first half of this book, the author does not get too heavily involved in analysing variations & then in the second half he really gets into it, probably because the focus is on the sacrifice. The emphasis of all these games is on the middlegame, the author just annotates the first more or less 20 moves (most games) & then analyses the middlegame with explanations & variations. Any endgames are just glossed over. I like the way that the author thinks. He reiterates throughout the book the general & key concepts to look out for such as co-ordination or unco-ordination of your own &/or your opponent's pieces, the attackers to defenders ratio, intuition, calculation, the pawns in front or your opponent's King, the change in valuation of the pieces as the character of the game changes, imposing a higher degree threat amongst others. The repetition of such concepts really drills into your memory what to look out for in your own games. Thank you Mr Sokolov for your contribution to this niche topic in chess. As important as positional considerations are in chess, the vast majority of amateurs need to read this book so that they gain some knowledge & confidence to seize the initiative & actually play for a decisive win. Maybe, I am being a bit harsh on my fellow amateurs, but I find the vast majority of them are minimally into tactics & struggle to come up with a plan, afterall, it is a black & white jungle in the middlegame. This book can only be of assistance!!!

High quality information

Interesting, but I have not yet read it through.

Really great book.

Having written well-regarded works on pawn play, the Nimzo-Indian, and the Ruy Lopez, GM Ivan Sokolov turns his attention to dynamic play. He annotates 92 sparkling games, which include 21 of his own plus a wealth of classics from the likes of Fischer (4), Kasparov (12), and Tal (15). It's hard to pick a favorite game, but here are a few that caught my eye: * In Karpov-Kasparov, Linares 1993 we see Garry offer a sacrifice on almost every move, but Tolya must keep refusing the offers. Soon Karpov has retreated all his pieces to the first rank, while Garry's army is well-coordinated for an irresistible onslaught. * Tal ignores Lutikov's hanging queen (Tal-Lutikov, Tallinn 1964) in order to make a quiet rook move that targets black's king in the center. Lutikov gives up his queen in order to reach an exchange-up endgame, but Tal eschews draw by perpetual and keeps finding amazing resources to keep black's rooks tied down to defense. Lutikov tries to give up material to reach a defensible position, but Tal's piece activity and coordination garner the full point. * In Anand's "Immortal Game" (Aronian-Anand, Wijk Aan Zee 2013) the world champ offers a bishop and ignores his hanging f8-rook in order to pry open the a7-g1 diagonal. Controlling the long diagonal from b7 and the important f2 and h2 squares with his wonderful g4-knight, Anand organizes a mating attack that Aronian cannot resist, in spite of his extra rook. Sokolov declares it "perhaps the best game on the theme of 'ignoring the threat and imposing your own (higher-degree) threat' I have ever seen!", and I have to concur. * In Byrne-Fischer (Sousse Interzonal 1967) Bobby leaves his king uncastled in a Najdorf Sicilian and launches his h-pawn toward white's kingside. It undermines white's g3-knight, driving it eventually to the irrelevant g7 square. "Fischer's 13....h5! so uncoordinated the white pieces that a seemingly balanced position was turned into a lost one with one 'small' move," as Sokolov notes. The material is nicely organized into 16 chapters on various aspects of dynamic play, such as pawn breaks, decoy sacrifices, and sacrifices for development. Sokolov averages about 2.5 pages of annotation per game, with a focus on middlegame play. He is very generous with diagrams, averaging over 7 per game. Best of all, Sokolov writes with wonderful clarity and insight; I experienced "that's interesting" and "how about that?" moments every game. Sokolov seems to be writing for a target audience of stronger club players, as he not infrequently assumes the reader will see a tactic that is not so simple. For example, in Sokolov-Gheorgiu 1990 he states that white's play has been leading up to 24. Re6, and then moves on with the game. This puzzled me for a moment, because at first glance 24. Re6 just drops the exchange to 24....Bxe6. I had to figure out that the rook is poisoned because black will lose a piece if he touches it: 24....Bxe6 25. dxe6 Rff8 26. e7 Qxe7 27. Bxa8 Rxa8 and now the queen fork 28. Qd5+! garners the a8-rook, and with it the game. If the author had been careful to explain such tactics, I would be able to recommend the book down to an ELO of about 1400; with some work (which is not a bad thing!) a 1600 could figure out enough of the tactics to learn a lot of chess from this anthology. This is easily the best anthology I have read on dynamic play, and I heartily recommend it to chess players rated 1600-2200. The publisher provided a review copy of this book to me in exchange for my honest review. My ratings of the publisher's books have ranged from 3 stars to 5 stars.

It would have been a good book, but it's too much trouble to wade through all the typos.

La forma de explicar y describir cada plan y cada jugada hacen de este libro una joya

Book is good but the person who typed the manuscipt into electronic version of Kindle was obviously not a chess player. In my life I have not seen so many errors in notation. E.g. In the game Sokolov v Gheorghiu is written: '23.b4! ... 23...b6 - 23...cxb4 loses to 24.Rxb4 (NB illegal move - should have been 24.Qxb4) Qf8 25.Qfe1 (should have been Rfe1) Bd7 26.Qxb7 - so finally the Qb4 is on the right spot. And mistakes like that I found plenty. Nobody is perfect and I have not read the printed version but if someone wants for Kindle edition £18 or so then the quality should be accordingly. It is really shame because Sokolov's book is good and sound and this is not his fault. I have tried to report these errors to Kindle but there is another glitch - I wrote comment but it was impossible to send it.

Extremely nice book, for club players. A paradigm shift for an average player like me

El libro contiene partidas con juego dinámico. Las partidas son de alto nivel, se centran en el medio juego, en la lucha por la iniciativa.

Good