Frag Rattmann, Rattmann hat ...

Dan's chess students are amazing. One of them just won the World Open Under 2200 event with a 7-1 score and took home a treasure which would have choked the gullet of Long John Silver. It was just another result of Dan's coaching and teaching methods he has used over the years.
Heisman understands that many newcomers to chess can't play good moves because they do not see them! In Everyone's 2nd Chess Book he explains and demonstrates the virtues of time management, patience, perseverance, and offers his "11 Mistakes to Avoid" so that you can win more games.
Packed with sound advice, real games, photos of real newcomers, and illustrations to lighten your load, you will discover how to play good chess and how to keep parents or mentors from having a coronary whenever a good move is missed (yeah, like they're perfect themselves)!
Dan Heisman, an engineer from Philadelphia, spends his free time teaching and coaching chess teams (including one of the best teams in the inner city). Holding a national master's title, he's no slouch himself.

This is Dan's first book for Thinkers' Press.
Everyone's 2nd Chess Book is my third chess book. I like to think this one, like the others, is unique, helpful, and contributes to the world of chess knowledge. Almost all beginner's chess books are written with one of two ideas in mind:

1. Teach the student the basic rules, like checkmate, how the pieces move, and a few basic principles, or
2. Provide a series of basic tactical exercises (pins, forks, double attacks, etc.) to help the beginner learn to spot simple combinations and then help him progress to more complex winning exercises.

However, based upon my chess teaching experiences with hundreds of beginners, young and old, there is a definite gap between the time you learn the rules and the point at which doing tactical problems is feasible. This gap consists of the period when the beginner's brain learns to recognize more easily the possible moves that each piece can make, both by the beginner's pieces and his opponents', as well as understanding the value of pieces and figuring out when each piece is safe. Everyone's 2nd Chess Book is designed to fill the gap between "How to Play" books and "Beginning Tactics" books-the missing link.
Not many of these beginner's books attempt to cover the mental process that a beginner goes through during this gap. Everyone's 2nd Chess Book covers quite a bit of this process by discussing the general term "board vision," which has to do with how the brain, through memory, visual input, and pattern recognition, grows to understand what is happening on a chess board.
The problem with the approach in beginning tactics books is that at first beginners lack the board vision to remember and use the knowledge from the exercises. They need some experience between the time they learn the basic moves until the time they are able to consistently solve simple tactical exercises. For example, most beginners need time and experience just to recognize when their pieces are safe and how to count whether they come out ahead, behind, or even through exchanges. Almost all beginners need to master this step before they can learn how to win a piece through a pin.
Just as GM Andrew Soltis addressed serious players in his The Catalog of Chess Mistakes, this book provides the many "What to Avoids" for beginning chess players. In addition, it provides a series of "Improvement Tips" that will help all beginning chess students improve their game at a rapid rate.

Many years ago Grandmaster Nikolai Krogius wrote a book called Chess Psychology. But unlike other books on chess psychology, he wrote not only about "psyching out" your opponent or "playing like a tiger," but instead categorizing areas of psychological mistakes related to what I am calling board vision. Krogius defined:

• the retained image -when analyzing a position you accidentally visualize leaving a piece where it was instead of realizing it was moved during the intended combination

• the inert image - in unbalanced (especially winning) positions, the inability to suddenly switch the focus to a dynamically new counterchance of your opponent

• the advance image - the imagined threats of a player's opponent become so strong that the player loses all objectivity in trying to deal with the perceived, but not necessarily actual threat.

All of the above are primarily characteristics of advanced play. Watching beginners play, I have found conclusively that the reason newcomers leave pieces en prise (French for: able to be captured) or miss simple tactics is not necessarily because of their lack of knowledge (of tactics, for example), but just because they lack the necessary board vision to "see" which of their opponent's pieces are attacking a square or that any tactic at all is possible.

Teaching a tactic to a beginner before they develop the necessary board vision produces diminishing returns, because the knowledge to use the tactic is hampered by the inability to see that the pieces involved are set up for the tactic. Until I understood this, I found it frustrating to show beginners basic pins and forks, only to see them completely miss these same tactics immediately thereafter during their gaines. Once I understood why, I began to concentrate on helping beginners develop better board vision as quickly as possible. After the beginner gained the necessary board vision capabilities, then they picked up tactics much more readily, as they could "see" what was happening when it occurred in their games.

This book deals with a broad range of "board vision" problems, concentrating mainly on those that occur during the beginner and intermediate levels-I think Krogius and others have done a fine job explaining what happens on the advanced level. Therefore, besides Everyone's 2nd Chess Book or Chess Vision: You Can't Play What You Don't See, we could also have named this book, Developing Board Vision, Beginning Chess Psychology, Chess Thinking Development, or even Beginner's Chess Mistakes. No matter what the name, we will be examining the problems and mistakes chessplayers run into during the early stages of their chess development.

We will also cover some other important bits of information about rules, etiquette, etc. that pertain to the early period of chess development. Any helpful topic is fair prey, especially if it aids beginning players. The idea of the book is therefore to not only cover how one advances after learning how to make the moves, but also to provide practical advice both for players at this level as well as for those who may be instructing them. We only assume that the reader knows what is in the most basic beginner's books: how to move the pieces, the basic rules regarding checkmate and draws, and algebraic notation.

Everyone's 2nd Chess Book is primarily aimed at the following readership:

• Chess Instructors

• Scholastic Chess Sponsors

• Interested Parents

• Beginning Chess Players Teenage Level and Above

• Anyone interested in how beginners learn to play (better) chess

Everyone's 2nd Chess Book covers the lower to medium level student, with USCF ratings below 1400-and for the most part, below 1000. (Note: ratings range from 0 to about 2800, which is world champion level.) These are the vast majority of players, and the ones who make the kind of serious mistakes we will try to teach you to avoid.

Thanks in part to the movie, Searching for Bobby Fischer, the need for this book has soared. The U.S. Chess Federation (USCF) reports that the number of junior memberships has gone from about 5,000 in 1990 to over 40,000 by 1998. Correspondingly, the median rating of USCF players has dropped from about 1500 to about 1100 as more youthful, beginning players enter the wonderful world of tournament play. ..

Inhaltsverzeichnis

007 Introduction
013 Learning, Chunking, and Chess Mistakes
027 Developing Board Vision
047 Board Vision and Beginner's Guidelines
056 Don't Make Lemonade When You Should be Making Ice Tea
065 Know the Rules
075 Board Vision and Time
081 Just Because It's Forced
087 Assume the Best
094 Don't Believe Him!
098 Chess Etiquette
107 Illustrative Games
119 About the Author
121 Colophon