My System Fast Track Edition Edited By Alex Fishbein

Many strong chess players, may experts, many masters will tell you that the one book in their library has been, and continues to a common staple is My System by Aaron Nimzovich which is almost one hundred years old.

I originally attempted to read and analyze this book back in the 1980s, it was in descriptive notation which made it a little hard to follow, and Nimzovich is pretty colorful with his language, but he did tend to lose me in some of his prose. A few years ago I also purchased the algebraic edition, but alas, the same problem continued to plague me with this read.

Enter My System, Fast Track Edition. This version of the book has been streamlined and edited by Alex Fishbein and is truly easy to follow and read. While the edits simplify the language, they tend to keep Nimzovich's colorful analogies and language in the text. So far, the read has been much easier to read, much easier to understand and much easier to follow. 

Mind you, I have only read the first couple of chapters The Center and Development and Chapter two, The Open file for the Rook. But now, I am really stoked to begin part two on Positional Play, but will not get into it until I finish part one, The Elements. 

Just curious, has anyone else purchased and added this new edition to their library, and if you have how do you like it, or what observations can you share, or what do you not like about it?

Robalero

I should mention that at Amazon, this book list for $17. plus a couple for shipping.

I've just ordered this so will update once I've read it.

I have the combined My System and Chess Praxis (New in Chess) and it is one of the recommended books by Yusupov (in his course books). I'll admit that I sometimes find the archaic language a little tiring, some of the tangents quite irrelevant and some games not particularly instructive for the theme under discussion. It's far from bad, but there are certainly far easier books to read.

This new 'abridged ' version promises to mitigate my qualms with the original.

In this age where we have a app or down load or up load etc , My System by Aaron Nimzovich , Make you think + you need to work at it ! Chess Praxis is way harder .

I have the physical copy (of both). The Yusupov series is far harder than My System and requires greater mental effort and work. This isn't the point - it's about clarity.

In this day and age of short attention spans and assumed knowledge (as one has watched a short online video or read an online article) as part of my job I have to explain the laws of thermodynamics. The text books often leave people confused. Usually due to their insistence on 'sounding academic '. Frequent feedback I receive is "why couldn't they have just put it like that!? Now I understand ". The use of plain English greatly enhances comprehension and learning.

This new book aims to enhance the clarity of the 1920's version.

[Quote:

“If we were to compare the d5-knight with a newly published newspaper, the rook at d1 would correspond to the capital that stands behind the name of the enterprise. And what role does the e4-pawn play then? Well, the role of the agrarian party. You see, a newspaper has both capital and a unified party behind the scenes; such a paper we can justifiably describe as solidly funded. But should either of these be lacking, our daily paper (the outpost) would all of a sudden lose just about all its prestige and importance.”

[End Quote]

(Nimzowitsch, Aron. My System & Chess Praxis: His Landmark Classics in One Edition. New in Chess, 2016.

I guess if you think hard enough, dig out some 1930's historical texts and "work hard enough" this paragraph may help your understanding of outposts. This quote is indicative of the prose of the original.

My take: Good luck with that, Nimzowitsch's My System wasn't particularly lauded when it was published, mainly because it isn't a system at all. Keene's "reappraisal" book was interesting but was only putting his work in perspective, the "20th Century" Editions of both My System and Praxis (which I also have) are awful - but good luck to this new take.
It really is not a 'system', and while I did find it of interest when a club player, I would not recommend this book to anyone as a method of improving chess, only as an interesting read. Of that era, Reti, Lasker and Tarrasch all produced much better instructional books, especially Lasker's Manual which while being philosophical (like the Principle of Proportion section for example) the book sets out the development of ideas and why (in Lasker's opinion) all adages, sayings, pointers, rules-of-thumb and 'principles' need to be accompanied by deep calculation of the actual position. Nimzowitsch's My System might be of great interest, but unless you can calculate the interest in the book is more 'how on earth could this be called a classic'? 
Only an opinion!

Good points KerryGM8. But there are areas of useful (if verbose and anachronistic) subject matter.

I'm leaning a lot on Yusupov here as I have started his series. He recommends (for positional/strategy): My System, The Game of Chess (Tarrash), Masters of the Chessboard (Reti) and Lasker's Manual of Chess.

CH8 of Build up Your Chess 1 (fundamentals) is centralisation. From the recommended text the main contributor to this is Nimzowitsch (and a game from Reti). 'My System' has 2 chapters covering various themes on this topic over many pages (greater than 20). Some of the examples are explained by Yusupov over 4 pages. Interestingly, his analysis differs. I will credit him with being more correct.

So in summary, Yusupov has taken some of the framework of My System as relevant for his course series. It is clear from Yusupov's prose (and instructions) that you should also read the relevant recommended reading. This is what I started doing and struggled (not due to complexity, more so tedium) with My System.

My hope is that with the core content; maintained, corrected, clarified, prose modernised and condensed the Fast Track version could provide greater utility.

I will update this with a short review comparing the two when it arrives. I chose to not use the "free next day delivery " (that I pay annually for!?) behemoth and buy from a smaller retailer. Unfortunately this means I'll have to wait.

Aron...not Aaron.

Edit: Lol at the downvotes for giving the author's correct first name. Did that first name hurt someone's sensibilities? If someone is going to promote a book, the *minimum* that they should do is get the author's name and the title of the book correct.

FAST TRACK REVIEW:

As in, a short review of My System Fast Track edition.

I was using My System to support me studying Yusupov Build Up Your Chess positional chapters. I got to "Centralisation " and Yusupov's text was too limited for someone at my level so I referred to 'My System' (from his recommended reading list). After reading a few hundred words that weren't always clear due to their anachronistic prose, perhaps not relevant to the topic at hand and verbose, I looked for other sources. My System went back on the shelf. Struggling to find anything better I stumbled across this book.

Job done! If we presume all the coaches and GM's who tell us Nimzowitsch is still relevant today are correct and the main issue with My System was the language and lack of clarity then this hits the mark!

It feels and reads like Nimzowitsch, just without the hard to understand lengthy tangents. It is now easy to read, to the point and highly instructive. Any overly dogmatic or incorrect parts have been ammended or replaced.

Mr Fishbein deserves an award for this effort! If ever you wanted to progress on to an intermediate level positional text book this one is fantastic!

In fact, I'm so impressed I'm going to investigate Dvoretsky's endgame manual Fast Track edition.