Perfect Your Chess

By Andrei Volokitin and Vladimir Grabinsky

Published by GAMBIT

Grandmaster Andrei Volokitin was born in 1986 in Lvov. In 2004, he won the Ukrainian Championship and was a member of the team that won the Chess Olympiad in Calvia. In the January 2005 rating list he was, at age 18, placed in the world's top 20 for the first time. He has won many prizes in junior championships and major international events.

International Master Vladimir Grabinsky is the coach of the Ukrainian youth team. In addition to Volokitin, his pupils include several other players who have achieved international titles at an early age.

Andrei Volokitin is one of a rare breed of players: he achieved a ranking in the world's top 20 while still a teenager, playing dynamic and often brilliant chess. Although we cannot all aspire to emulate his achievements, there is much that we can learn from his training methods, his games and his general approach to chess. These topics are the subject of this book, written in collaboration with his trainer.

The core material of the book is 369 positions where the reader is given a task or asked a question. These tasks resemble those that players regularly face over the board, and are especially useful from a training viewpoint. Sometimes we are told we need to find a combination, but often the task is simply to decide on a move. It is for us to determine whether to play quietly or stake everything on a sacrificial attack!

The examples are all from recent years, and so even the most zealous reader of chess literature will have seen few of them previously. Many of the positions are from Volokitin's own games, so we get the 'inside story' on some truly spectacular chess. We are also presented with fine examples from Grabinsky's training files, carefully collected and graded over the years for their instructive merit. The commentaries and detailed solutions explain the key issues in each position, and also convey the authors' philosophy of chess and their love for the game.

The book is divided into three parts:
1) Make a Move (positions where one must find the best move). This section is concerned with developing intuition and imagination in chess.
2) Find the Win (positions in which one must find a forcing variation, leading to a win). The examples are designed to test combinative vision and the calculation of variations.
3) Answer a Question (the reader's task here is to find the answer to a concrete problem). Solving these examples will develop one's positional understanding and logic.

Each part of the book consists of 123 positions. Before the reader gets right into the positions, there are short introductions telling what they should calculate and find in order to get the most out of each position as well as telling what aspect of their chess that section will help them improve in. The first 23 problems of each part are examples from Andrei Volokitin's own games. Next are 100 graded examples. These are arranged in order of easiest to hardest or in this case hard to hardest! After the problems of each section are the answers. The authors do a good job of explaining the answer and also give pieces of advice. Even if you are not able to correctly solve the position, you will still learn a great deal just from reading the explanation.

After going through the positions I can say I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I must note that this book is NOT for beginners. The difficulty of the positions and comments from the authors show that this book was directed towards challenging players all the way from master to even grandmaster! This book is perfect for ambitious players wishing to take their chess to a new level but at the same time possibly too difficult for players under the 2000 level. If you are up to the challenge, this book is a must have and will provide countless hours of fun.

NSG Rating = 9.8 of 10