Maxim Blokh (1960-2016) was a Moscow chess coach who was awarded the ICCF (correspondence) grandmaster title in 1998 for his result in the Konstantinopolsky Memorial. From 1990 to 1994 the young Alexander Grischuk was among his pupils. The Russian Chess Federation’s 2016 obituary called his tactics workbooks popular in the chess world and noted that their material is used in the CT-ART training program.
All four of the Blokh books we stock are collections of combinations sorted by theme. They range from about 600 combinations (600 Combinations, 96 pages) to almost 1,500 (The Art of Combination in Chess). For a club player of about 1600 or more, Combinative Motifs is the one to start with: it is the only one of the four with independent reviews, and it is the book version of CT-ART 3.0.
The workbooks
Hannaco Enterprises, 2006. A 304-page paperback with 1,205 tactical positions, grouped by combinative motif. The book’s description pitches it at players rated 1600 to 2400. P.P.O. Kane notes that the positions are graded for difficulty and found that “the grading system is pretty reliable” (The Caissa Kid, 2019). Geoff Fergusson, comparing it with the newer CT-ART 4.0, judged that “the paper version is more convenient” (Empirical Rabbit, 2011). Kane’s reservation: “Blokh sometimes only gives the main line, whereas the side variations are also of interest.”
The Art of Combination in Chess
Russian Chess House. A 256-page hardcover with almost 1,500 combinations from practical games and specially composed positions. Among the composed ones are more than 200 that Blokh built so that White to move and Black to move each have a winning line. The tasks are arranged by theme and the main diagrams are highlighted at the start of each chapter. Each task carries a numerical difficulty rating, so you can start at the easy end. It is the largest of the four, and it overlaps with Chess School 6 (see below).
Chess School 6: 1200 Chess Combinations
Russian Chess House, 2022. A 246-page hardcover, volume 6 of the publisher’s Chess School series (see our Chess School guide), with over 1,200 combinations from games and composed examples, arranged by theme. It also has over 50 fragments from games by Blokh and his students. Its description, like that of The Art of Combination in Chess, mentions over 200 positions composed by Blokh, and the two are arranged the same way, so expect some overlap; most readers will want one or the other.
Russian Chess House, 2019 (first published in Russian in 2001). A 96-page paperback with 384 numbered problems; many have one solution for White and one for Black, which makes about 600 combinations, grouped by combinative motif. It uses the same motif-sorted format as the larger books at a fraction of the length, so it suits a reader who wants to see whether this kind of drilling works for them before taking on one of the 1,200- to 1,500-combination books.
CT-ART on disc
CT-ART is a Windows training program, and we stock four versions on disc. CT-ART 3.0 is the software version of Combinative Motifs, with 1,217 main examples covering roughly 1600 to 2300 Elo. CT-ART 4.0 enlarges that course to 2,200 basic and 1,800 auxiliary exercises. CT-ART 5.0 and CT-ART 6.0 are bundles that add courses by other authors to the CT-ART course; 6.0 has five courses covering about 200 to 2400 Elo. Each later disc contains the CT-ART course, so you need only one disc; 6.0 covers the widest range, and its new interface also gives points for winning moves other than the main one. CT-ART 3.0 in particular is old, so check that it runs on your version of Windows: a chess.com user reported in 2013 that it “runs well on windows XP but you will face problems with windows versions from Vista onwards” (chess.com forum, 2013).