eelco
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re:ADV: New Chess Mentor Sicilian Defense Course - 2007/01/08 13:00
After reviewing some of Wolski's earlier material in Chess Mentor, I could not resist and did indeed order the Chess Mentor Sicilian course. It is of very high quality - In its 41 challenges, Wolski cover quite a bit of terrain in the most often played Sicilian variations (Though I did not notice anything on Accelerated Dragon, one of my favorites).
The best feature of Chess Mentor is the way in which it make it possible for all wrong moves to be explained by the author. If you make a move not suggested by the author then it is usually because the move makes no sense or loses in an obvious way. Other moves outside of the moves required by the author for you to solve are often explained thoroughly by the author as alternatives that do not work ideally for the explained reasons.
Though there are only 41 challenges, there are dozens of explanatory sections within each challenge. This makes the course very interesting to go through as you will not encounter every explained item the first time you go through it.
Chess Mentor makes you repeat these challenges in order of how well you solved them on previous occasions - It is by this repetition process that insures that you will absorb the written material over a period of time. (Assuming of course that you don't lose patience & stop utilizing the program completely.
The only thing I was somewhat seriously disconcerted about was that there was no way to scroll through the Author's analysis of variations in the text - In this way the Chess Mentor reminds one of a book where you have to have a chess set to go through the moves nearby. The up-side to this is that it can also 'force you' to use the vacillation skill within your own head to try to see the variations that the author is covering.
My own rating is 2008 USCF & 2196 Fide, so at first I thought that perhaps the quizzes & questions would be too easy for me, but this turned out not to be the case. I continue to find the Sicilian challenges very good reading & not overly simple to understand the strategic underpinnings of many of the positions without looking very carefully at the positions & reading the text explanations completely through. Since I use Chess Base Opening CD's extensively to teach kids with, and find their training questions within games to be of first-rate quality, it will be interesting to use this program in sessions with the kids to teach them even more about the different
Sicilian structures.
I am still not sure that you get the same value for money spent, that you do with Chess Base CD's, but this is one of the finest Chess
Mentor modules that have yet been produced.
Hopefully Chess Mentor will continue (after-all, it has been more then
2 years since the last chess mentor module came out!), to produce chess mentor courses, and it would be especially nice if they are on the openings, as this module is.
Larry S. Tamarkin
Chess Software addict!.
---------
Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win.
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