by GM Eugene Perelshteyn and FM Nate Solon
So, I know there are at least a thousand existing reviews of this book floating around on the internet already, but I just wanted to add my two cents. I’m not going to give it a full top-to-bottom review. I just wanted to make a few comments from the below 1500 perspective, and I haven’t posted anything in a while, so I want to get back to posting on a regular schedule.
First, I highly recommend the book to anyone above 1000. It’s a quick and straightforward read that shouldn’t take very long to complete. The chapters are succinct without endless variations to go through. It’s essentially diagrams to evaluate and decide the first couple of moves and whether white or black is better. I worked through a couple of pages of exercises every night and it only took me a couple weeks to complete. Oddly enough, the fact that it’s a shorter book motivated me to work on it every night versus a tome of endless games and variations.
The chapters are divided into:
- Introduction
- Elements of Evaluation
- My Coaches
- Evaluation
- Visualization
- Comparison
- Quartets
- What’s Next?
All of the chapters were great, but by far my favorite chapter was quartets. The chapter was divided into sets of four positions that were similar with minor differences, which emphasized the significance that even small changes in the position could make on the evaluation. It would be great to find a source for similar exercises to review. Hopefully, more authors will create similar products.
Again, I’m not doing a full review since there are so many out there. So, I will leave it at the above and my biggest takeaway. My takeaway was that I realized just how bad I am at evaluating positions after working through the exercises. There were many positions I evaluated as completely opposite to the right answer. Probably 50 percent of the time if not more. As a result, I have started working with one of my coaches to go over positions in a similar manner to evaluate random positions and talk my way through them. I’ll assume it’s not going to make any difference in my game in the near term, but I’m confident it will have longer-term benefits. Even as a novice, I know that accurate evaluation is a foundational skill. I hope to see more authors, or the same ones, releasing similar products.
Bottom line: 8 out of 10, highly recommended.