WINNING CHESS PUZZLES FOR KIDS Volume 2
REVIEWS
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Amazing, creative and very, very fun.
By David Gil Piñeiro on Amazon.com
It's an incredible book. If you are a teacher, you must have this book. Amazing, creative, and very funny. The kids love these puzzles. All the books of Jeff Coakley are excellent. I recommend them without a doubt.
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Thought Provoking, Fun, and Instructive
By Dan Heisman
Excerpts from the book review section of the excellent Chess Cafe website: www.chesscafe.com. The complete review can be found at: http://www.chesscafe.com/text/review754.pdf
It is rare to come across a book that is as unusual, challenging, fun, and instructive as Winning Chess Puzzles for Kids, Vol. 2 (WCPK2). It is a true gem.
Jeff Coakley is an outstanding author, and each of his three previous books was excellent in its own right:
Winning Chess Puzzles for Kids, Vol. 1 - the only one of the four that is really just for kids and beginners.
Winning Chess Strategy for Kids - an excellent intermediate book introducing an entire spectrum of strategical considerations, plus a bundle of good basic tactics problems. Strategy is recommended for players of all ages up to mid-intermediate level.
Winning Chess Exercises for Kids - In my opinion, the best intermediate puzzle book ever written. The questions and answers are both well chosen and comprehensive. By the latter part of the book many of the puzzles are quite challenging, even for me, so anyone who thinks this book will be easy is in for a shock. In fact, of all the books I have ever recommended, Exercises gets the single best feedback from adult students.
When Winning Chess Puzzles for Kids, Vol. 2 arrived in the mail a few weeks ago, I mistakenly thought it was more of Winning Chess Puzzles for Kids, Vol. 1.
I should have known better! WCPK2 is an amazing puzzle book and the title is somewhat misleading. Yes, it contains a fair dose of what I thought it would contain: tactics puzzles more difficult than in WCPK1. But it's what's in between these tactics problems that makes the book such a gem: a treasure trove of assorted board vision, chess/math, helpmate, and retrograde problems.
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(See the complete article on the website for a detailed look at several examples from the book.)
This is a book that not only provides a fascinating variety of puzzles that's sure to please almost everyone, but also delivers in quantity. There are 249 pages of puzzles and fifty-six or so to provide answers. ...
If you are looking for a book that is thought provoking, fun, and instructive, then Winning Chess Puzzles for Kids, Vol. 2 will more than fill the bill.
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Excerpts from a review posted on www.amazon.com
The complete review can be found at: http://www.amazon.com/Winning-Chess-Puzzles-Kids-2/dp/1895525195/ref=pd_sim_b_5
Coakley is by far the best writer of instructional material for children and chess teachers.
By Elizabeth Vicary
September 2, 2010
I just got Jeff Coakley's newest book, Winning Chess Puzzles for Kids vol 2 (aka "the orange book" ...). I've written before about how much I love Coakley's work ..., and with time my feelings have only deepened.
I wrote this review as a blog post, which can be read with the diagrams here: http://lizzyknowsall.blogspot.com/2010/09/winning-chess-puzzles-for-kids-volume-2.html#more
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The orange book is a sequel to the red book, with tactics sheets and checkmate problems mixed in with some more unusual types of puzzles. I don't want to repeat myself, so I refer you to my earlier blog post for some preliminary thoughts on some of Jeff's original problems, and why I find them so instructive.
A couple general observations:
*Jeff is quite a strong player, ... and an experienced coach, so the chess in his books is generally both correct and relevant. (Lots of books have beautiful examples of things that never happen in kids' games.) This latest is a little more whimsical, but even the more fantastical problems tend to have some instructional value.
*The material gets slowly harder, so you can trust that the problems on the first few mate in 1 sheets are very do-able for the whole class, but that the later ones are tricky. Authors don't always take the time to order problems correctly, and that's frustrating when you give a homework without looking at it closely and only realize that night that half the problems are insanely hard.
*Positions are frequently grouped on the worksheets by similarity, which saves you precious setting-up time at the demo board. Some of the tactics problems ask a student to find 4 or 5 forks, which is obviously uber-efficient.
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(See the complete article on the website for a detailed look at several examples from the book.)
It's really a treasure trove of instruction and fun. If you are a chess teacher or the parent of a kid rated between 100 and 1600, you are insane not to buy it.
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