Tactics in the Chess Opening 3: French Defence and Other Half-Open Games (Tactics in the Chess Opening) Tactics, tricks and traps! For casual players and club players. Every chess player loves to win early in the game with a deadly combination or a cunning trap. On the other hand, nobody wants to be tricked by his opponent before the game has really started. The chess opening is a minefield. The popular series Tactics in the Chess Opening teaches casual players and club players how to recognize opportunities to attack early in the game. You will also learn how to avoid standard pitfalls in the opening. This book explains, in more than 230 carefully selected and annotated games, all the tactical themes and typical traps of the main lines in the French Defence, the Caro-Kann, the Pirc and the Scandinavian Defence. After studying these brilliant surprise attacks, or just enjoying them, the adventurous chess player will win more games.
Customer Review: Sum up
A bit too simple
A deeper analysis would be interesting
Difficult to read
Customer Review: Useful games colection
Let me clear the basic facts about what kind of book this (and the rest of the series) is; it is a game colection, very resonably anotated, with critical points arising somewhere at the end of opening phase or at the begining of middlegame. (It is not a bambambum tactics which resolve a game in instant.) At that point thematic tactical move arises which usually changes the evaluation of position by (dissa)prooving the way to handle it as black or white. Since the whole game is covered, we can see the ultimate logic of playing that position to win, but in number of games inferior side is giving its best to stay in the game. Although cover of this book is focusing on french defence, out of its 236 pages the french is having around 1/4 of it having 68 pages. The rest of the book comprises of 50 pages of Caro-Kann, 22 pages of Scandinavian, 40 pages of Pirc, 12 pages of Kings fianchetto and 26 pages of Alekhine, to be precise. What I like the most in this book is that authors managed to find a good balance between descriptive and analytic in annotating the games from the book. Also, the most of the games in here are very new, which is nice from the teoretical point, but I like that authors also included some of the great clasic games from those openings, which can be very instructive.
I give this book a strong four stars, and can recommend it to the practitioners of theese openings as a useful reminder and refreshment.

Tags: learn chess, chess tactics, chess book, chess guide