We begin by identifying the essence of the matter under consideration. It will soon become apparent that, although the term 'tactics' appears on nearly every page of nearly every chess book, it is far from simple to find its exact and accepted meaning, just as it is similarly difficult to do so with other very important elements connected with tactics.

   When my friend and former pupil Martin asked me to write a foreword to his book, I did not expect that I would learn so much from reading this work, but that is what happened. The first reason is that, in addition to some classic examples, he has found tactical examples that I did not know, thus avoiding one problem of many combination books.