Book Review: How To Beat Your Dad At Chess by GM Murray Chandler

A checkmating guide disguised as a children's book

Baby’s First Chess Book, but Not Just For Kids

One of the first chess books I ever read and actually completed all the way through was How to Beat Your Dad at Chess, by GM Murray Chandler. The cover of this book is colorful and contains hand-drawn characters in a cartoonish style, which might make you think this book is just for kids. It’s not. Chandler explains in the introduction:

This book is for every chess-player who regularly faces— and loses— to opponents stronger than themselves. This could be at work, down the chess club, at school, in tournaments, or, as for many youngsters at home, playing Dad. In fact for ‘Dad’ read anyone who constantly outplays you, grinds you won, takes your pieces and checkmates you.

In other words, this book is about how to beat players who regularly beat you, though for the purposes of this book, those players are all “Dad”.

Another slight mislead about the title of this book is that it’s not a book about strategies to beat Dad. It’s a book about wiping off the smirk on Dad’s face via a shocking and unexpected checkmate. The book gives you “50 Deadly Checkmates” (actually 47 plus a few other tricks) to learn and study and hopefully give you an edge against your opponents. Chandler focuses on the practical, so the ideas contained in the book are relatively common and therefore the study material is likely to be very useful for the improving club player. The main point of this book is to teach you how to checkmate in the opening or middlegame.

Before Chandler throws all these patterns at you, he explains the importance of pattern recognition in chess in the little section “How Chess Masters Think” with a bit of anecdote and some summaries of scientific studies performed on the thought process of stronger players. Then we see a few ideas on how chess combinations work (a combination of tactical patterns), then a bit of advice about when Dad throws a wrench in the mix by not castling, and the importance of knowing the patterns via both colors.

99% of this book is Tactics.

The rest of the book is rather self-explanatory: It’s each deadly checkmate, with diagrams, breakdowns of the elements of the combination, and a few examples. 50 “chapters" though, to be clear, they’re rather short and you could probably finish the entire book in a couple days if it’s your first time around and you’ve already got a bit of a tactical eye.

After these deadly checkmates, Chandler quizzes you on your knowledge with the “Test Positions” chapter. 36 positions from actual tournament games. Now’s your chance to show how well you actually understood the things that you learned. I recall my first time going through this test, I scored 25/36, which Murray’s little rubric says is “excellent pattern recognition”. Without having reviewed the patterns in this book in a long time, I decided to take the test again just to see how I compared, and my result was 34/36, or “Tournament strength player”. Call me a bit rusty since I didn’t review the checkmate examples before doing that final test. Two points below “Master standard” according to the little chart, though nowadays I would imagine that most club players 1600 and up should be able to score 36/36 if they’ve reviewed the samples here and are freshly ready to do the test.

My personal experience with the book, and rating recommendations

Overall, when I first got this book back in December 2019, I was hovering between 1300 and 1400 rating on chesscom blitz, but shortly after going through this book in a couple days’ time, I could already see the results: I was finding ways to checkmate my opponents that I had never seen in a game before. It raised my skill floor by about a hundred rating points almost immediately. What this likely indicates is that I could have been helped even more if I had gone through the book at an earlier time, possibly even in the 1200s. Ergo, I think this is possibly a great choice for any player around the 1100 level. Tactics rule the day at this level, and this is a quick way to boost your tactical ability by learning lots of new patterns in a very digestible way. One piece of advice I give to readers of this book: Try to solve every position you see and write down your answers.

One big caveat

There is one main problem that prevents me from saying this book is a must-have — and it’s not really the book’s fault, because this book is excellent. The issue is that the Checkmate Patterns Manual by Raf Mesotten exists, both in book form and in the original Chessable course form, and in my opinion has virtually made HTBYDAC obsolete because the content is better organized, the examples more thorough, and CPM comes with 1000 exercises. I have the Chessable course version and in my opinion, it is a must-have course because of how thorough and helpful and informative it is. That being said, compared to CPM, HTBYDAC is an extremely quick read, and might fill an easier hole in your skill repertoire since it’s so small in comparison. If you’re looking for a reader’s digest version of checkmating tactics in the middlegame, grab Murray’s book for sure. You might even consider this book a steppingstone to the Checkmate Patterns Manual in that case.

While I can’t say How to Beat Your Dad at Chess is a must-have, I still recommend it for players in the 1100-1200 rating range up to 1700 or so. It’s got plenty of positions and ideas to learn, and it’s easy to read. You don’t need a chess board for this one, and in fact if you do it without a chess board, this will also double as some nice visualization practice. Lastly, when you do the test positions, write down your answers and visualize the solutions to get the most out of it. This is a great little book, $10 in digital form, even if it’s existing in the shadows of more recent giants anymore.

4/5