Review: Mating the Castled King by Gormally

Title: Mating the Castled King.
Author: Danni Gormally.
Publisher: Quality Chess.
Year: 2014.
Pages: 336.
Price: 22,99€.

These days I have been taking my sweet time in creating this posts. There is a big reason for that: I have been exhausting those books I have already read and find interesting. I have some yet, do not worry, but sooner rather than later I will run out and my only possibility would be to make a review with the new books I read.

Luckily, I have a long list of books waiting to be read (including Gelfand's book!) and some of them are closer to the finish line than others (I cannot focus on one book at a time).

Mating the Castled King is one that I just recently finished. As the tittle suggest, it is a guide to attacking chess, similar to The attacking Manual by Aagaard which hopefully I will be reviewing soon. I am not an attacking player, I have never been, so all the stuff explained seemed very exotic to me, but very inspiring too!

This book has a curious structure. It has a second chapter with 160 exercises on combinations against the king while the rest of it (except a small test at the end of the book with 12 positions) is like a normal book where it gives you examples showing what the text is trying to argue (for example that sacrificing a bishop on h6 might be a good idea). I like this mix quite a lot, it forces you to solve problems (lots of them) and also tries to bring some good examples home.

Another sweet point for the book is that almost all the examples given in the text (or in the puzzles) were unknown to me.

About the edition of the book there is not much to say. The quality of this publisher is outstanding as it has always been and I have not found anything troublesome in it. I have even grown to be fond of this green cover which I disliked at first. The length of the book is quite all right, more over when you know a little part of it has tons of exercises.

The explanations to the attacking themes are correct. Maybe I did not found myself too much impressed by them, but what do you want? The themes themselves where kind of obvious for me. The exemplary games on the other hand I think were skilfully chosen and most often than not where downright impressive (ok, I am a novice attacker, but nevertheless). That was what I lacked. I know perfectly well that Rxf6 is very dangerous, so it is Bxh7 or playing h2-h4-h5-h6, but selecting the right examples, the more spectacular ones, or seeing how you chain sacrifices is what caught me.

I think Gormally hit a sweet spot when trying to balance how many variations to introduce in the text. Maybe in some examples it had less than I wanted them to be, but overall it has everything you need without drowning you in variations.

My conclusion about the book is very positive. I think that Gormally has made a great job with this book and players below 2300 fide will find it very interesting. I do not want to spoil other reviews for you, but if I were to buy one book on attacking chess, at the moment this would be it.

Review: For Friends and Colleagues volume 1 by Dvoretsky

Title: For Friends and Colleagues Volume 1. Profession: Chess Coach.
Author: Mark Dvoretsky.
Publisher: Russell Enterprises.
Year: 2014.
Pages: 384.
Price: 30$.

This is the first volume of Dvoretsky's autobiography. I put that last word in italics because it is not your run of the mill biography, the author has restricted himself to tell his life only when related to chess. I think that is a great idea. What I'm interested in is Dvoretsky the chess player and trainer, not the son, husband or father.

One thing that I want to get out of the way fast is that this is not a book to train chess. Even if there are commented games and diagrams, those are auxiliary parts. The focus on the book is to tell a story, Dvoretsky's story. If you want to improve your chess, go search elsewhere.

To me this was a very interesting book. You get to know more about the soviet times and about some great figures of the game. However the book seems like a collection of little works put together. There are some parts of it that are a direct rip of already published material, but I couldn't shake the feeling even in those parts where no mention of a previous print was made, that was actually what happened.

Maybe because of this, the best word to describe the book is uneven. There are some really great parts, when I couldn't stop readying. On the other hand, some parts where plain boring. I felt it specially at the end, but through the book there are always passages like that. 

Other than that, there is a small detail that I did not like: According to the book, Dvoretsky was never wrong. Whenever someone else in the book is portrayed as having a different opinion than that of the author, the inevitable conclusion will be that he was wrong and the author was right all along. There are passages where this someone came back to the author apologizing and Mark graciously accepted the apologies and resumed the work together.

As I see it, everyone makes mistakes. It is not possible for the author to never be wrong. So there are only two options left: Or he has discretely hide his own shortcomings, which maybe is a legitimate thing to do being this his book, or in at least some of his stories the truth is not entirely told.

I would line with the first option, because Dvoretsky (as portrayed by himself) seems to be a person with ideals and integrity, incapable of changing the facts to fit the vision of oneself. I would even go as far as to think that it was not intentional. But nevertheless it is there, and it annoyed me!

All in all, I think it is a good book, and if you have 12€ lying around, I would advice you to buy the kindle version of the book. It is half the price, and the book itself is not that great to justify having it physically.

Review: GM Preparation - Positional Play by Jacob Aagaard

Title: Grandmaster Preparation - Positional Play.
Author: Jacob Aagaard.
Publisher: Quality Chess.
Year: 2012.
Pages: 312.
Price: 24.99€.

This book is a part of a 6 title collection. Each one deals with a specific topic through some introductory prose and tons of exercises. The objective is to give people aspiring to be Grand Masters (or already GMs wanting to stay sharp) training material. The one being reviewed is centered in positional play.

I must confess that I'm in love with workbooks. I am a very lazy person and if given a book where I only need to read and nod, I will just do that. On the other hand, with this book there is not much more to do but to solve exercises so at least you will put some work on it.


The book is divided into three chapters: Weaknesses, Pieces and Prophylaxis. Each chapter has a short introduction and afterwards some exercises on the theme described. There is also a very big chapter at the end with 150 exercises.

For me the thematic division helps to a certain extend. In the 'Pieces' chapter you will try to improve one of your pieces and in the 'Prophylaxis' chapter you will try to ruin your opponents plan. However it is quite difficult to have a clearcut division, so in some exercises you will not really get a help for knowing the chapter it is in.

Anyway it is not such a problem, and the last chapter is the heaviest of them all, and there the author does not try to classify the position into themes, but let you alone with your positional understanding.

While reading the book I didn't get the feeling that the solutions where wrong, hence I don't think I let my engine do its magic. I guess that some of the positions don't have a clear answer and maybe the engine propose a better solution, but all in all the impression is that Aagaard checked them himself so no egregious mistake happened.


At more than two hundred exercises the book is packed. Assuming you spend 5 minutes per position, you will have more than 15 hours of quality chess for only 25€. I think that is a pretty good deal, even if the book itself is not on the cheap side.

The only negative thing I can point out is that its audience is not as the book suggest IMs wanting to make to the next level. While working on the book I let myself 25 minutes on the clock for each page of 6 diagrams. That is less time than the author suggests, but nevertheless usually I got 3 or 4 diagrams right out of the 6. So in my view I have the perfect strength to enjoy the book: being able to barely solve the problems if working hard on them. As I'm 2200 elo myself, I don't think many strong IMs will have much difficulty with it.

On the other hand, this is good news for the mere mortals: we can enjoy this great work even at our pity strength!

My suggestion would be: Go download the excerpt. There are 6 problems with its solution, let yourself half an hour of thinking time to solve them. Check the solutions. If you got between 2 and 4 right, you definitively have to get this book. With less than 2 problems solved you may want to go elsewhere, It can get really frustrating not to solve anything, and you are not really improving if the level of the exercises is so far beyond yours. Fortunately, if this is your case, in this very same publishing house there is something for you too: Yusupov great work!

If you were to solve more than 4 exercises out of 6, maybe you are already too strong for the book, but I let you decide by yourself. If you reached that level of chess you know what you are doing.