Test your chess: Reitstein problems

Before Christmas, I finished my daily text of solving and blogging about Cordingley's book. I then took a short break, deciding what to do next, whether to continue with daily puzzles from a book, or to write something else.

I more or less knew that I wanted to continue. It is an excellent discipline, having to blog each and every day, and also having to try harder: unlike say answering puzzles in magazines or in newsletters like Chess Today, where it is easy to come up with partially correct or wrong solutions, or to look too briefly at puzzles, since there ubiquity means they are less consequential.

Again my choice of puzzle book wasn't too hard, but my short listing was made easier by Nelson Mandela's recent death. He apparently passed some of the time away on Robben Island playing chess and draughts, as reported by Chessbase http://en.chessbase.com/post/nelson-mandela-a-man-for-the-ages. Some years back we visited Cape Town and of course Robben Island: here is his cell.

I don't recall how I got the first- I must have bought it in a second hand stall, but Have two puzzle books of positions from South African game, so the next series will be puzzles from Leonard Reinstein's Test your chess!. Having got the first volume, I wrote to Leonard, and he sent me a copy of his second of the two puzzle books: so that will probably be the next one to be blogged about.

Rein cover

Like my copy of Cordingley, my copy of Reitstein also has some personalisation in the inside cover, this time by the author himself.

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