Book Review: Small Steps to Giant Improvement

Small Steps to Giant Improvement by Sam Shankland

Book Review and Takeaways

What did I learn or takeaway?

• Every pawn move is absolutely critical!
• I have found myself looking at pawn moves more carefully, critically, and often.
• Critical pawn moves often only provide a subtle advantage that even grandmasters end up throwing away.
  • Many games in the book have lines like from here both sides made many silly errors.
  • I find this to be the case often in my own games and it was oddly peaceful seeing that I am not alone here.
• Doubled pawns, advanced pawns, and any other pawn that seems like it might be a weakness is only a weakness if it can be attacked and/or not defended properly. 
  • Making a pawn look weaker is not enough. Calculate deeper to make sure that it is actually weak.
  • This reminds me of a game where I gave my opponent really strong isolated double pawns thinking it was inherently a weakness. It was not. I threw away a great position to give my opponent a strength.
• When you have doubled pawns, or are thinking about accepting them. Can you trade them away soon. I have found myself using this in my calculations.

Observations

• I really enjoyed the clear rules that Shankland provides.
• He provides several clear examples to illustrate each principle.
• I don’t mind at all that the games start by focusing on the objective at hand.
• However, the many long games without analysis after the principle has been illustrated I found less helpful.
  • I used Forward Chess, which I highly recommend for this part of the book. When I play over master level games, I want analysis. I would rather spend my time with different games.
    • This is especially the case for the many games, where Shankland says that the great move got spoiled by errors from both sides.
    • Why not just cut off the example there? It’s a question that I don’t have an answer to. But it doesn’t feel worth the time to spend an hour on each game with a chessboard.
• I really appreciated that in many of the games, Sam would point out the best followup moves that he thought best took advantage of the concept he was illustrating even when the players didn’t make them.
• The examples provided by Shankland are so clear and perfect, that it makes me wonder if they are cherry picked and don’t adequately represent the broader set of games.
  • Practically, I wonder if I will struggle to implement these ideas because they are so complex and nuanced, even if Shankland explained them so clearly.
  • I will say that I have been thinking about these concepts a lot when playing lately, so they may be sticking. I do wonder if that will stop happening once I move onto the next book.
• In some ways the book is repetitive. There are a lot of games that could go in other chapters. I think some of the chapters could have been combined.
  • However, the amount of time I spent thinking about these concepts has helped me think about them more in my games.
  • Repetition is a key component of remembering information, so perhaps this is actually a plus rather than a minus.

Final Thoughts and Recommendations

• I think this will be one of the most impactful books on my chess. I had not read any books focused so narrowly on the subtle, complex, and important role that pawns play.
• While the scope of the book is quite limited, I think this is a positive. I encountered so many examples covering similar ground, that some of it seems to have seeped into my mind.
• I highly recommend reading the book with a reader of some form. I used Forward Chess, and it worked great. I slowly and carefully played through the moves associated with the lesson. For games that had a lot of annotations, I played through them slowly. But for the many games that were just a list of 30 moves, I played through them much more rapidly.
• Shankland’s explanations are the clearest and most insightful that I’ve encountered in a chess book. He made the concepts seem so simple and clear. In fact, his explanations are so clear and precise, I am left wondering if I truly understood the material, or if Shankland’s examples and explanations gave me the illusion that I learned them.
  • Despite this fear, I do feel like I am already seeing some results in my games.