Review: Attacking Strategies for Club Players by Michael Prusikin

Attacking Strategies for Club Players

by Michael Prusikin

New in Chess, 2021, 189 pages

Sample pages available on the publisher's website.

The subtitle explains the book's topic: How to Create a Deadly Attack on the Enemy King. It is specifically about attacking the king - no minority attacks on the queenside here. It is full of tactics, combinations, sacrifices and tips on keeping the initiative, but all specifically as means of hunting down the opponent's king.

The GM and FIDE senior trainer Prusikin suggests that the target rating range for readers is around 1500-2300, which seems about right to me.

The main part of the book consists of 89 games, some complete, others fragments. They are arranged in 16 thematic chapters. Each chapter begins with a page or so of guidelines on the sub-topic. These prose sections are concise - the author is rightly keen to get to specific examples.

If I were to pick out one common thread running through the advice, it would be this: 'don't be stingy'. Sacrificing is not an end in itself. But one facet of really strong players is that they are not afraid to give up material to achieve a concrete goal, such as keeping the enemy king stuck in the centre. We see this again and again throughout the book.

Fifty well-chosen puzzles conclude the work, in ascending order of difficulty. This is very nice training material.

Here is the complete contents list with page numbers:

6 Explanation of symbols
7 Foreword by Alexander Khalifman
11 Introduction
13 Ch. 1) Prerequisites and rules for attacking the king
15 Ch. 2) King in the centre
30 Ch. 3) Obstructive sacrifices
38 Ch. 4) Attacking the king without the queen
48 Ch. 5) Pawn storm with opposite-side castling
60 Ch. 6) Pawn storm with same-side castling
70 Ch. 7) The Steinitz ‘battering ram’ – using the h-pawn against a fianchetto
83 Ch. 8) The Alekhine ‘battering ram’ – using the g-pawn to destroy your opponent’s king protection
90 Ch. 9) The nail in the coffin
96 Ch. 10) Doubled g-pawns
103 Ch. 11) Using pieces to attack the castled position
113 Ch. 12) The Grand Prix Attack
126 Ch. 13) The Chigorin ‘outrider’: the knight on f5
134 Ch. 14) Long bishop on b2
143 Ch. 15) Interference
147 Ch. 16) Breakthrough on the strong point
153 Ch. 17) Test your attacking skills
163 Ch. 18) Solutions
185 Index of names
189 Bibliography

Not every possible attacking theme is covered here, but it is a good selection and organised methodically. Some topics, like attacking the king in the centre, are essential to a primer like this. A few others are quite original. For example, chapter 4 on attacking without queens contains some wonderful material:

Playing through examples like this is not just fun, it also helps to expand our pattern recognition. Prusikin follows this up with a composed study that uses the same theme - a lovely touch.

That is a good example of how well selected the examples are. Most of the games are (relatively) modern, with several by the author himself, and some by players who I guess may have been his team-mates, such as GM Klaus Bischoff. This ensures that the large majority of material will be new to most readers.

As the chapter headings indicate, though, there are some references to key classics, too. This strikes me as a constructive balance. Perhaps a game like Marshall-Burn will be very familiar to some readers, but it's a great attack nevertheless. Prusikin presents it in chapter 7, on the 'Steinitz' h-pawn battering ram, quoting some of Marshall's humorous notes that can be read in full here:

If you buy the book, another one of the highlights to look out for is the correspondence game van Oosterom-Bang (2002), a beautiful, original example of the power of a pawn that reaches h6 (the 'nail in the coffin').

One very minor oddity: some games are presented as fragments beginning around move 13. Why not give the opening moves in such a case? I wondered that particularly when Prusikin underlines (in chapter 14, 'Long bishop on b2') that a theme arises from a variety of openings - but then doesn't give any of the opening moves. Of course, it's usually quite easy to look them up online.

I've enjoyed this book a great deal. I recommend it as an excellent introduction to attacking methods. Above all, most of the examples are beautiful and memorable, and so help to build up our attacking imagination.

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Postscript: the Foreword by former FIDE world champion and eminent author Alexander Khalifman is not an integral part of the work, so I'll comment on it separately. Khalifman endorses the quality of Prusikin's work. But he also criticises all other books on the topic of attacking play that he has seen since Vukovic's classic The Art of Attack (now incidentally available as a Chessable course).

Khalifman lists four flaws that these books all share - lack of originality, sensationalism, (over-)complication, and subjectivity (i.e. being too tied to one particular player).

Which books does he have in mind? We don't know, because he doesn't name them.

I tried quickly listing previous books on a similar theme that occurred to me:

• Zenon Franco, The Art of Attacking Chess (the level and style are reasonably comparable with Prusikin's book)
• Ivan Sokolov, Sacrifice and Initiative in Chess
• Yakov Neishtadt, Attacking the King (and other books such as the classic Paul Keres Chess Master Class)
• Colin Crouch, Attacking Technique

These are all books I liked and learned from in various ways; there are many others I haven't seen, including famous ones like Larry Christensen's Storming the Barricades. I'm sure bad books on attacking chess have been published, too. But Khalifman's comments leave me puzzled. What is the intention behind such an abstract critique?