The Say Chess Podcast

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The Tactics Ladder — A Chess Tactics Book For Expert Players (2000 FIDE Level)

It is time to give you an update on my very ambitious chess tactics book series. The Tactics Ladder. If you haven’t heard about the project check out this post:

I successfully published the two blue books for the 1400 FIDE rating range in February. My original plan was to work my way through the 2000 puzzles in the blue series myself. However, they were a little too easy for me to be challenging. So when I made a poll to get an indication of what book I should do after the 1400-level and it turned out evenly, I decided to pick the 2000 FIDE rating.

That is the rating goal I want to attain, so why not make some training material to get me there. I started working on the book in March. One problem occurred to me quickly. The number of puzzles drops when we go up to the 2400 puzzle rating on Lichess around 7400 puzzles had a user rating above 80, which I decided to be the minimum I would accept for the book. Originally I had planned two books for each step in the series, one on openings and middlegame positions and one on endgames. The relatively low number of puzzles made me change my mind and I will now publish only one book for the expert level. This also secures that the puzzle popularity rating will be higher compared to a two-book series.

Popularity rating = (upvotes - downvotes)/(upvotes + downvotes)

The average popularity rating for the book will be 91,8! The next decision was to select some relevant themes for the 10 chapters. Here is what I ended up with:

* Opening tactics I

* Opening tactics II

* Crushing in the middlegame

* Pawn endgames

* Mate in X

* Minor piece endgames

* Advantage in the endgame

* Sacrifice

* Rook endgames

So a slight pull towards the endgame, but I also think that it is something most chess improvers, me included, forget to work on.

Soon to be published!

The process of editing and aligning everything in Word has been a bit tedious and frustrating and has taken some time to overcome. Imagine creating a word document with 1000 pictures!

However, I think I have won the battle against Word and will be ready to publish very soon!

Free stuff to members?

Finally, I’m thinking about enabling the membership function here on Substack, which would make it possible to support the newsletter. I still want to keep the newsletter free, but like many other content creators with Patreon or other similar solutions, I would be able to offer special perks to members. A perk could be the PDF of ‘The Tactics Ladder’ when it is released.

Did you solve the two puzzles?

/Martin

Solutions

* Solution no. 1

* Solution no. 2