Book review: Practical Chess Exercises (Cheng, 2008)

Introduction

Practical Chess Exercises (Ray Cheng, 2008) is a book of 600 chess positions. The reader is given absolutely no indication for what to look for, and must simply try to find the best move. Most positions have some instructive positional or tactical idea in mind, though — land your knight on on a juicy outpost, watch out for a threatened tactic, win a technical pawn ending, fork your opponent's family, and so on.

The solutions, however, include a list of themes present in the puzzle ("Destroy the counterplay", "Fork, skewer", "Obtain the 7th rank", "Discourage enemy break" and so on) and a rough estimate of the puzzle's difficulty, from one to four stars.

You can find a sample on this Amazon page.

The good

I found the problems to be generally instructive and quite solvable. The difficulty was a bit high when I started with the book at somewhere around 1800 rapid on Lichess, but now at around 2150 it feels just right.

The book's whole idea ("Here's a chess position, find the best move.") is great. While I don't agree with the usual criticisms of tactics-only puzzle books, getting to just look at positions without any bias is nice. Positional exercise books are also a maddeningly underrated genre of chess book, and I wish more of them were published.

The author is not a titled player, which some might perceive to be a downside, but I think not being ~700 points above the target audience has helped Cheng to choose worthwhile and appropriate positions. Other people I know who have worked through the book seem to agree.

A surprising plus is the book's size — it even fits into some jackets' pockets, and is very easy to take along for a bus ride. The best puzzle book is the one you have with you. Six exercises per page also make for a good number to solve in one sitting (30-45 minutes), and I often found myself solving one or two pages in bed.

The book is fairly cheap and readily available, and the puzzles bear repeating at least once or twice. Basically, I don't think you will run out of material to solve as long as you're in this book's target audience.

The bad

One infuriating feature is how the positions are presented in the paperback book. On each spread, there are six exercises on the left page... and on the right one, their solutions. I'm sure you can see the problem.

As the book suggests, you can cover the opposite page with paper, but this was really a problem that didn't need to exist, and it's a bit bizarre that nobody thought of a better way to do this. As it is, you can easily spoil solutions for yourself if you aren't careful.

Sometimes there are multiple trivial tactics on one page — sometimes as many as four — and sometimes a page is filled with very difficult three- and four-star exercises. I wish there was a bit more balance, but it's not much of an issue.

Some explanations for solutions didn't really make sense to me, and sometimes a modern engine considered another move to be stronger, but these were so few to not really be an issue.

In conclusion...

Practical Chess Exercises is one of my favourite chess books. It's an excellent exercise book for club players (in Lichess terms, probably 1800 to 2300 rapid; people on the lower end might even use it as a set of instructive examples more than a puzzle book to be solved), and I wish more books like it were published — I, for one, would certainly rush to buy them.

The layout is a disappointing mistake (well, blunder, even), but the book's other virtues make up for it, and I imagine most people will read this on an e-reader anyway.

All in all, I have found the book to be excellent, and I heartily recommend it to anyone in the abovementioned rating band looking to improve their chess.

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— Numerot