Invisible Chess Moves: Discover Your Blind Spots and Stop Overlooking Simple Wins [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

Israeli International Master Yochanan Afek and French FIDE Master Emmanuel Neiman have analyzed hundreds of high-level international games to discover what kinds of moves are difficult even for the masters to see. The result is this extremely useful collection of positions, game fragments, and puzzles that illustrate the most common causes of chess blindness.

Light bulbs kept going off in my head as I worked my way through the book. "Queen circuits" are hard to see? No kidding, my only tournament loss to a non-expert this year was the lamentable result of not seeing a diagonal queen maneuver clear across the board, followed by a horizontal check to the opposite wing. Anticipating a probable result can lead to blindness? Absolutely! In two drawn rook endgames this year I've missed opportunities to punish critical blunders and collect the full point, simply because it didn't occur to me that a winning opportunity might suddenly and serendipitously appear. Best of all, shortly after I had read the section on backward attacking moves, I invested a knight in a kingside attack because I saw that a critical defense would not prevail because of a quiet, backward attacking move available to my light-squared bishop.

Take a look at the invisible moves Afek and Neiman have classified and see how many you might have overlooked recently:

Part I - Objective Invisibility - 21

Chapter 1 - Hard-to-see moves - 22
A: Quiet moves - 23
B: Intermediate moves - 27
- The desperado - 31
C: Alignment - 36
D: Forgetting the rules - 53
E: Quiet positions - 57

Chapter 2 - Geometrically invisible moves - 71
A: Horizontal effect - 72
B: Circuit - 74
- Rook circuit - 74
- Bishop circuit - 75
- Queen circuit - 75
C: Changing wings - 77
D: Backward moves - 83
E: Backward knight moves - 86
F: Pin and self-pin - 89
G: Geometrical moves - 96

Part II - Subjective Invisibility - 111

Chapter 3 - Invisible moves for positional reasons - 112
A: Pawn structures - 113
B: Weakening of the king's defences - 118
C: Unexpected exchanges - 123
D: Unusual position of a piece - 126
E: Anti-developing moves - 133
F: Residual image - 135

Chapter 4 - Invisible moves for psychological reasons - 151
A: Anticipation of the probable result - 152
B: Blunders in World Championship matches - 163
C: Forward moves in defence - 167
D: Backward attacking moves - 176

Test - 191
Test solutions - 205
Explanation of Symbols - 237
Index of Players - 238

In addition to 30 exercise positions sprinkled through the text, the book concludes with 53 test positions graded in difficulty from 1 to 5 stars. My online ratings and recent OTB results indicate that I'm about FIDE 1800, yet I found the 2 star puzzles reasonably challenging. I learned a lot from working through the solutions of the harder ones, though, so don't shy away from this book if you're rated 1700 or above. Below that rating, though, you are probably better off just working through a conventional tactics book; if you have difficulties seeing knight forks and X-ray attacks, you should get those under your belt before you attack these more advanced themes.

Excellent tactics books have flooded the market, but excellent books dedicated to hard-to-see moves have been, well, practically invisible. Thus I am willing to give this unique work 5 stars in spite of some minor flaws that I hope will be corrected in a future edition:

* The authors do not apply their criteria for game selection consistently. They state that they will generally not use examples that involve rapid time controls or time pressure, but almost 10% of their examples (15) come from rapid games or zeitnot situations. Moreover, in several of the examples the players actually saw and played the putatively hard-to-see winning continuation. Why are they in a book about moves that masters don't see?

* About a dozen of the 53 concluding test problems have hints that are too obvious. "Long diagonal" will definitely draw your attention to the winning skewer on the a8-h1 diagonal, don't you think?

* The first set of 6 exercise positions do not include a discussion of why the winning continuation should be considered hard-to-see.

* The English translation occasionally falters, using phantom words like "automatical," "profylaxis" and "devaluating."

As these flaws detract little from the book's overall impact, I heartily recommend it to anyone rated 1700 or above who wants to improve their chess vision.

Full disclosure: The publisher provided a review copy of this book to me. I have endeavored to remain completely unbiased and helpful, and feel confident that the review reflects my commitment to objectivity.

This is a well organized and novel book. The topic is relevant to any chess player or trainer. The authors make a good effort in dissecting the reasons behind blind spots in chess. I just wish the authors provide more exercises. Neiman and Afek use one page for one diagram when the same space can hold at least 6 diagrams. In other words instead of one problem the can provide 12 problems with the answers in the back.

This is a very good book , that give me the motivation to find and classify my own blind spots. Now I search for blind spots in my games o when playing solitarie with GM games. For example in the first game for the World Champ between Smyslov and Botivinnk the later played pawn in g X Rook in f6 doubling his pawns!. What! Then I realized that my option Kxg6 was positionally"correct" but allows drawing chances. In contrast, Botvinnink choice was "antipositional" but justifed by concrete calculation and superior understaing of the position (the double-isolated pawn provides control of the critical e4 square).

I am not a professional reviewer. My skill level is around 1900 USCF and the publisher did not provide a sample copy of this book.
Update Feb 6 2012: This effort by Neiman and Afek won the book of the year award at chesscafe.

I love tactics! Everyone likes different aspects of this great game: some like to study openings, some like middle games, some endgames, some like to study positional ideas, but I love and find the beauty of chess in tactics and tactical surprises. The reason this book was named "book of the year" by ChessCafe must of been for the extreme beauty of the chess tactics the authors were able to include in this work. I needed another tactical book like I needed another orifice, but the problems in this book are real gems. On Chesstempo.com (which I highly recommend) I'm rated in the top 95 percentile of users and I have solved many thousands of problems, but this book is a real joy and that sets it apart from most books on this subject. I set up most of the examples and the test problems up on the board and will spend up to 30 minutes working out the solutions. The authors are to be commended for their search to find such refreshing examples of the hidden ideas in chess!