The Inner Game of Chess: How to Calculate and Win

by Andrew Soltis

Every player has heard the saying, "Chess is 99 percent tactics." It isn't.

It's 99 percent calculation. But until now there has never been a book devoted entirely to this most mysterious and essential chess technique.

This book examines both the technical and practical aspects of how to think ahead -- the selection of candidate moves, the evaluation of end positions, finding the proper move order, and the like.

Special attention is paid to the broad range of calculating mistakes, such as overlooked zwischenzugs and "quiet moves," visualization blunders, and "believing" your opponent.

Genres: Chess

368 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1994

Reviews

[Randy · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Inner Game of Tennis?

The Inner Game of Tennis: The Classic Guide to the Mental Side of Peak Performance does not deliver on its title - despite being one of the great sports pyschology books along with Golf is Not a Game of Perfect. (Chess players should read both).

No book can teach you how to calculate and then just "win." What Soltis does is show you the problems with calculation. When should you calculate? When should you calculate until you might be in time trouble? When should you 'believe your opponent' (meaning, don't accept the sacrifice), and when should you just be practical? Another review here seems to ask for more examples, but I have had both the old and new versions of this book and both are so packed with examples that I took more than six months to study them in depth. I am a weak player, so I'm not sure what anyone else expects, but there are a ton of games in the revised edition.

I worked through this whole book like a college textbook, and I am the better for it. Even if I don't win more games, I enjoyed the moments when, in the text, a move was left unexplained other than the comment: "not...", and I saw it in my mind. That is what calculation is.

Another book you might like is Improve Your Chess Now. Tisdall has exercises to practice the 'stepping stone' method to hang onto long calculations. I did not need this in the Soltis book - his variations were easily in the grasp of this 1400-level player.

I cannot remember what book this came from, but when calculation is the topic, the question seems to be "how far do Grandmasters calculate?" I think about this in every bicycle training ride I am in: the answer is related to: "how many times did Greg Lemond shift gears in the 1989 Tour de France?" Someone - I wish I knew who - said: "as many as he needed to". How many moves ahead does a GM calculate? As many as she needs to. Aspire to this!

[maarten mellegers]

bijzonder

[Iggy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is my first and only Andy Soltis chess book that I own and only the second chess book in general I read cover to cover. For those who don't know, Soltis is a Grandmaster and quite a prolific chess author. However, like with most other prolific authors, his books are hits and miss. I think this one is mostly a it, but with caveats. My overall impression is that it's a useful and helpful book for the intermediate to advanced player, but by no means is it a tactics primer for the beginner/intermediate player, nor is it a training book for the more advanced player.

Basically, Soltis doesn't teach you how to calculate. He doesn't introduce any methods, i.e. stepping stones, etc., nor provides any kind of systematic treatment of the subject. You have to already have some grounding in calculation and visualization to begin with. What the book is about is helping an already advanced intermediate player by providing practical tips and advice, many of which are actually quite useful.

The book contains a decent amount of diagrams, taken from all sorts of grandmaster games over the years, which aren't technically puzzles to be solved by the reader, but can (and I think should) be used that way. Some are quite easy even for the novices, but some could even challenge a master level player - it all depends on the chapter and context in which they are introduced.

If you are already quite an advanced player, let's say rated 2000+, then probably skip this book. Nor would it be helpful to a novice player. I think the goldilocks rating zone for this book is about 1400-1800. More to the point, this book was originally published in 1994 and has been somewhat updated in 2010s. However, most of the material is still quite dated.

Lastly, I think today there are quite a few very high quality chess only publishing houses, which publish very high quality chess books, including on tactics, and I would recommend looking into the newer books first, before considering this one.

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book presents a series of ideas/general principles illustrated by examples. Some of the ideas are fairly loose and descriptive rather than prescriptive. For example, on the order of calculating different variations, the only recommendation is that it depends on the person. Others are pretty obvious, like considering forcing moves. The main lesson is that each person must find their own style of calculation, using some combination of the types presented. As a result I'm not sure how much instructive value this has, but it does have some interesting examples.

[Judith Moreno · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wish it had come with more illustrative games

[maarten mellegers]

lekker compact bijzondere opgaven in een ruk uitgelezen

[Goetz Holic · Rating 2 out of 5]

It is not bad, but also not great.

I also own 'Improve your chess now' by Tisdall, which deals with many similar topics, and which I liked much better. This assessment is quite subjective obviously!