RAPID CHESS IMPROVEMENT is a rather unusual and interesting work that is designed to improve your middlegame play. Unlike most Everyman authors, de la Marza is not a FIDE titled player, but he has had an interesting, if brief career. In the space of two years he went from a USCF rating of 1321 to 2041, and he did it almost exclusively by studying tactics in conjunction with tournament play.

Most chess players are familiar with Teichman's dictum that chess is 90 percent tactics, but few dedicate that percentage of study time to it. Mr. De la Marza contends that lower rated players below Master should adopt his regimen if they would like to make rapid progress. He has very specific ideas of what is needed.

The core of his program is what he refers to as "The Seven Circles," which consists of assembling 1000 tactical problems and going through them seven different times for maximum assimilation. The goal is to improve the student's tactical and calculating ability. The author advises that this program is best implemented by solving the positions on a computer and gives advice as to the best program to use (his preference is for CT-ART 3:0).

What is one to make of this training program? Is it a fad diet or does it have a sound basis? I would say the latter, but with a caveat. There is no question that tactics are an important part of chess, especially for those players below 2200. Traditional chess learning often tends to be passive in nature and de la Marza's program offers students an antidote to this by actively engaging them. Solving tactical problems will definitely improve one's tactical and calculating abilities. These are two areas that amateur players are often quite weak.

That said, I'm not so sure that such a one-sided program is the right way to achieve optimal results. My preference would be to spend only half the study time on tactics and the rest on playing over well-annotated master games (LOGICAL CHESS MOVE BY MOVE would be one example) which offer plenty of explanatory prose and going over a good endgame book (Jeremy Silman's book on the endgame for Chess Digest and James Howell's work for Batsford are two that come readily to mind) with a friend.

Nevertheless, I still give high marks to Mr. de la Marza for his attempt to really craft a systematic training program much like one sees in other disciplines. If the reader gets nothing more from this book that urge to look more concretely at their study program, Mr. de la Marza will have succeeded.

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