Being able to solve puzzles and combinations is one of the principal components of a successful chess player. But how can one improve on such an important skill? How can one acquire combinational vision? The answer lies within the pages of this book! Experienced chess writer Jacob Aagaard explains how tactical intuition and ability develops and uses pattern recognition to improve the reader's tactical ammunition. It's also no secret that the continued practice of puzzles and combinations helps to sharpen the chess brain, and here there is a wealth of exercises and problems to solve accompanied by the full solutions and explanations. This book is a must for the serious competitive player.

* Improves tactical vision

* Ideal for club and tournament players

* Written by a battle-hardened expert

Jacob Aagaard is an International Master from Denmark who has earned himself a deserved reputation as an industrious and no-nonsense chess author.

His previous works for Everyman include Queen's Indian Defence and Meeting 1 d4 . He also authored Excelling at Chess , which was very well received by reviewers and the chess public alike.

This book has been a long time in coming. Actually, after finishing my first book back in 1998 I wanted to write a book like this, but it was turned down by my publisher at the time, Gambit. On their request I instead wrote a book on the Sveshnikov.

Now, finally, I have been allowed to publish this book, a book I have been working on for 12 months on and off, collecting material, analysing, commentating, losing interesting articles, cursing my computer and especially my own ability to operate it (do not ask about backup copies; when you overwrite your backup copies you lose your sense of irony!). But eventually I made it, and here it is!

Because I was relatively overworked during the summer of 2003,1 brought in Nikolaj Mikkelsen, a talented 15-year-old with the rarely seen ability for dedicated work. He collected many positions and discarded even more after hours behind the computer, and was overall a great help. So, besides a decent cut in the small fee, I felt that his name deserved to be attached to this book. Thank you Nikolaj!

The positions in this book have mainly come from my database of 2.8 million games com-I piled from many sources (mainly ChessBase). Many of the positions have previously not been noticed as anything special and were found by us. But we would be lying if we did not acknowledge a great debt to a number of ChessBase's regular annotators, including Har Zvi, Tyomkin, Adas, Bonsch, Gofshtein and Tsesarsky, as well as the many players who played the games themselves. The annotations here are my own, with no exceptions, but to go through already analysed games makes it easier to single out interesting tactical moments, and therefore it is important for me to acknowledge the great work of other people. Many improvements were found in existing analysis, and considerable analysis was found to be incorrect after silicon scrutiny. But it was still priceless to have a starting point like this.

Together with Nikolaj, my greatest helper has once again been Danny Kristiansen, who has found dozens of both minor and major flaws in the manuscript and asked me to correct them. 1 am deeply grateful for his help and think I would somehow feel lost without it. Thanks Danny!

Jacob Aagaard, Albertslund, Denmark, March 2004

List of Content

004 Bibliography

005 Preface

007 Introduction

011 1 The Adventure of Writing a Book on Combinations

025 2 Combinations and their Indicators

039 3 Sicilian Sacrifices

051 4 How to Solve Puzzles

057 5 Exercises

142 6 Solutions to Exercises