Susan Polgar books or Winning Chess series?
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Bruch wrote:
So Chirieac, what did you think of Susan's books? Did you ever read Seirawan?
Well, to be honest, I was disappointed. I thought there will be more explanations, more talk, not just brief/basic explanations and exercises/puzzles.
I didn't finished the first book yet.
I bought winning chess tactics and didnt really like it, sold it again. The rest of the winning chess series i got from the library, didnt really like them either. If you look at my rating you can rightfully deduce i havent studied them in-depth tho. I may be partly to blame, but the books also: they didnt inspire me to study them because of the -imo- boring way they are written. I am a lot more enthusiastic about the following three books i have in my possession now: 'The tactics of the end-game' by Jeno Ban, 'How to play chess-endings' by Eugene Znosko-Borovsky and 'Baroque chess openings' by Richard Wincor, which gives me one tacticsbook, one endgame book and one openingbook also containing some full games. I think this is a splendid collection and hopefully I will study those. Sorry to be slightly offtopic..
AnchovyD wrote:
Comparing these books is like comparing apples and oranges. The Susan Polgar books are more of tactics/mate-in-x type books. While she has a brief explanation of the rules and shows some basic endgame and opening stuff, 98% of the books are puzzles and tests.
The Seirawan books each cover a different aspect of the game, with the first book showing how to play, the elements of the game etc. The other books cover Tactics, Strategy, Endgames, Openings, and there is a Logical Chess type book in the series called Winning Chess Brilliancies. I really liked these books when I read them years ago. The only one similar to the Polgar series is the Winning Chess Tactics book which explains each tactic and gives you tests. The Seirawan Tactics book is harder than the two Polgar books. Some of the tests are really tough.
The Polgar books are good if you are looking for something to practice tactics puzzles with. The Seirawan books cover every aspect of the game and are verbose. Polgar is basically just chess diagrams like her pop's 5334 book but with a few words of explanation. You can get the Seirawan books cheap if you go for a used set as they must've printed a million of them over the past 15 to 20 years. I'd get the Seirawan books and definitely get either the Polgar or some other basic puzzle books to have something to practice from. The Polgar 5334 book is a great value but the problems get really hard once you get past the 300 mate-in-one's.
Good, detailed comparison. Thanks.
I had the same question way back year 2012. I ended up not buying both series. I memorized openings and solved tactics instead. Now I improved a lot. No strategy and no endgame study that time. The trick maybe is to keep your brain stimulated. Learning new openings and memorizing neurons is awakened.