Forcing Chess Moves: The Key to Better Calculation - Charles Hertan

Forcing Moves

I wish I could work with this book more often than I do. It is structured very well for a player of my strenght. My rating is currently 1359.

A patzer's praise for an excellent teaching tool

Years ago I was a "serious" chess player, but my competitive days are long gone. Instead I play daily on chessgames, which weekly offers seven chess puzzles taken from real games. Each game is rated, "Very Easy" on Mondays, "Insane" on Sundays. As a measure of my skill level, I usually get through Wednesday's puzzle, and can almost always follow the analysis of the various contributors.

Over the past several months, I've noticed that more and more of the commentators have referred to this book in glowing terms.

It was a revelation. The examples are well chosen and interesting, but what is more important, Charles Hertan has helped me greatly improve my solving ability. The editorial blurb is right on the money here:

"Charles Hertan has made an astonishing discovery: the failure to consider key moves is often due to human bias. Your brain tends to disregard many winning moves because they are counter-intuitive or look unnatural."

The other reviewers, much better players than I am, have done a great job of describing this book. I'm chiming in because Hertan's approach can help even a weak player like myself.

Perhaps when the weather gets warmer, I'll lose a few bucks at Washington Square Park. Hertan may help me slow the rate of cash outflow, but he'll certainly enhance my pleasure in playing as he already has done online.

Robert C. Ross 2008

Instantly Improved My Game

Let's face it, computers are outpacing humans on the chess board and have been for about 10 years now. For this reason, "Forcing Chess Moves" doesn't take a human approach to teaching calculation. Instead the author encourages the reader to adopt "Computer Eyes" while learning to calculate. The first two chapters are devoted completely to developing perfect two-move calculation, which Hertan believes is the key to mastery. I wouldn't know since I'm not a master, but I do know that through studying the two and three move mating puzzles he presented I've seen instant improvement in my game and calculation.

Another area that this masterful piece of work helped me improve is in understanding the tactics of sacrificing a piece. I tend to play for material advantage, so understanding the art of piece sacrifice has never really been my strong suit. By presenting a series of clear and fascinating sacrifice puzzles, Mr. Hertan furthered my knowledge of this technique. I still don't use them that often, but I now can recognize a sacrifice gambit when I see one.

What really impressed me, though, is Hertan's tone. His writing style is very direct, at times ascerbic, at times witty but always scholarly and excited. It is clear that Hertan really loves chess and the art of calculation. Be warned, though: The book can be grueling. It jumps right into calculation puzzles and positions and never lets up. There's very little theory or flowery text like in the works of Seirawan or Waitzkin. It is puzzle after puzzle after puzzle of interesting and formidable positions.

Best tactics book on the market

I currently own three chess books published by New in Chess, this publisher is the best of the bunch, high quality productions that exceed Gambit Books efforts. The 650 puzzles in Forcing Chess Moves are arranged in a logical sequence and have clear explanations. If you are rated under 1800 then The Complete Chess Workout is a better choice. I enjoy reading chess books and would rather lay on my back in bed and read a chess book than start a family and pop out three kids and send them to college and go into debt and pay off a mortgage and a car loan and credit cards and work like a slave or indentured servant in order to fulfill someone else's idea of the American dream, the American dream being to become enslaved to debt and work all your life and die a pauper with no savings. Yes, chess has saved my life!
Revised review dated 1/7/2008 after spending more time with this book I have come to some negative conclusions. The text is very gimmicky and teaches nothing, the author's constant reference to computer eyes is stupid and repetitive. The positions are not categorized in a satisfactory manner, and the positions are difficult involving 5 or 10 full move solutions. A better book is Soltis, Inner Game of Chess. If you want over 600 puzzles and are rated over 1800 then this book is alright, but treat it as a random puzzle book and ignore the written text. A better puzzle book is Chess Cafe Puzzle Book number one on tactics, not number two on positional play.

Should Be Converted to Software

Charles Hertan and New In Chess publishers are missing a great opportunity to convert this book to training software. A case can be made that Hertan's book is more pedagogically focussed than CT - Art 3.0, which dominates that field.

Relative to most other tactics books, this one actually advocates a straightforward thinking method involving forcing moves and, to a better degree than many similar efforts, does not focus on mating combinations almost to the complete exclusion of tactical opportunities for material gain, which are likely more commonplace in practice. "Stock" tactical motifs are covered in the first two chapters. I dare say that 98% of chess tactic books merely provide the information in those two chapters with varying degrees of examples. In this 400-page effort, Hertan moves well beyond that to more broadly consider and categorize forcing moves generally, many of which do not easily fit into traditional typologies.

I'm not necessarily convinced that Hertan's advocated postition of always addressing oneself first to hard calculation of forcing lines, rather than relying initially on more judgmental assessments to identify candidate moves, would survive a cost (in time) benefit analysis in many situations. Accordingly, I am in turn not necessarily convinced of his assertion that "A deep study of forcing moves is probably the single most important task toward achieving chess mastery." Some positions present a bewildering array of forcing moves and, in Hertan's explanations, this fact can sometimes be conveniently ignored, with solutions presented as if the winning move was necessarily the most forcing, which is not really the case. In these cases finding the winning move likley is the product of some process other than raw calculation of a large number of equally forcing moves. Likewise, the separate concept of "computer eyes" is gimmicky and unnecessary to his thesis -- the term is used in connection with the unremarkable concept that identifying the most forcing moves may include moves that are counterintuitive to humans, and that the human bias against considering such moves is not a tendency shared by chess engines. (While I really have no clue, I gather that chess computers in fact do not consider forcing moves first, and thus the computer allusion has no particular relevance to Hertan's thesis.)

This is not to say that Hertan's unique perspective, argument regarding thinking methods, and wealth of fresh examples from practical play, is not appreciated, or that adding increased consideration to forcing sequences will not contribute something of real practical value to those who need to sharpen their alertness to tactics. Hertan suggests at the end of the book that he wished it could be one's first book on tactics. Very few of Hertan's readers are likely to be blank slates, but I suspect that the greater value of his book will be to add new and useful dimensions to the play of those of us whose tactical approach runs somewhat in a rut.

Not insignificantly, the layout and production values of this book are above average. Returning to my initial point, the only way to materially improve the presentation would be to convert the book to training software.