Raymond Keene

I'd just like to bring attention to one problem with this book as a method of rating your strength. It's that it has rather fallen foul to the availlability of chess engines such as Stockfish, and the computational grunt they give the average chess enthusiast vis a vis the evaluation of the author.

My beef is this - the author basically takes you through a series of annotated games, where you are invited to guess the next move, and are awarded points if you get it right. You recieve nothing if you get it wrong (though there is a 100 point discretionary fudge-factor that is allowed on each question - if the move you chose doesn't lead to your mate or a loss of material). Now, maybe back at the time the book was written, amateur chess players would take the written word of a GM as gospel. However, nowadays we have access to engines like Stockfish to help evaluate chess positions. When playing through the first game, I thought that I had found a strong alternative move to the text (and therefore 'correct' answer); a fork c.f. a pin. Firing up stockfish, this move was evaluated by the engine as a whole piece-value better than the text move.

I was robbed!

Having said that, it is an interesting selection of matches and certainly provides insight. Just take it's 'ratings' with a pinch of salt!… (more)