A Field Guide to Chess Tactics by Farnsworth Chessable Dec 11, 2024 PGN Only

A Scaffolded Approach to Improving Your Tactics

Most people are familiar with the basic tactical themes like forks, pins, and skewers. But spotting them in the jungle of the chess board takes practice. The Field Guide to Chess Tactics is designed to take your basic recognition of these tactics, and turn into a finely-tuned tactics detection system.

This course aims to arm you with a complete database of tactical themes, carefully organized into thematic categories. Each theme comes with several examples of the tactic in practice, with different contexts and applications of the idea helping you to build up real pattern recognition.

This systematic approach to learning each theme is perfect for people who are new to chess – or, let’s be honest, those of us who have been playing for a while but keep losing to tactical blows!

The course covers tactics from their simplest building blocks and most straightforward versions, giving you a solid foundation to understand more complex themes.

This is a fork

Next, you’ll meet the same theme, with a twist. White has just captured a knight on e5, leaving the road open for another fork on f7.

If Black captures the rook on e5, then Nf7+ is a winning fork

In no time at all, you’ll be able to spot even difficult tactics in an instant. Can you figure this one out?

This will still, in the end, be a fork

You’ll repeat this system until you’ve mastered every type of tactic.

This is how you build pattern recognition.

Over 200,000 words of explanations and over 1110 hand-picked examples are carefully organized into categories. This makes it much easier to master each technique in a systematic way, since every idea is shown in different contexts.

There are explanations of not just how the tactic works, but how you should approach the problem in your own mind and the thought process that will get you to figure out the solution. Your mind will become a finely tuned tactic-detecting device!