thought that was implicit Michael-G!
Of course, open files isn't the half of the book. Showing how very strong players assess a position is there too.
Strategy books, which order?
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For those three books I would reccoment reading them in the following order:
1st) Weapons of Chess
2nd) Best Lessons of a Chess Coach
3rd) Simple Chess
All the while cross-referencing the preference works as you complete them. You could also do 1 & 2 concurrently using them to complement one another.
Michael-G wrote:
"Practical Chess Endings" by Paul Keres is also "must read".
Kotov's 3 books ("Play like a GM", "Train like a GM" , and "Think like a GM") are also very good but not so simple.Have them in mind for later though.In fact these 6 books plus the 2 excellent Chernev's books ("Capablanca's Best Chess Endings" and "The most instructive games of chess ever played")cover everything you need to know about middle game and together with "Practical Chess endings" almost everything you need to know about endgames(although study never really ends, especially endgame study) .
I have agree with the above, and second PCE, along with Reinfeld's On the End-game in Chess, but my all time favorite is Silman's Complete Endgame Course -- that's a must have!!!
whilst suggesting great strategy books, I have always liked Uhlmann and Schmidt's "Open Files". It was a classic behind the Iron Curtain but only re-released many years later because Schmidt defected from the DDR, essentially becoming persona non grata in East Germany, and the Eastern Bloc ended in 1989-91.
The authors basically tell you everything you need to know about open files. What makes it a good book is they have diagrams that have their assessment of the position right afterwards. That is a good time to put the book to one side and assess the position yourself; it is good training to compare what they think is important and how you thought of the position. Of course, files will be uppermost in your thoughts given the nature of the book!
It's a very good book indeed but a very specialised one.You can't start from a book that deals with only one concept if you don't have a general knowledge first.Also the examples are very good and a lot but the same subjects covered in this book can be found if you read other more general(but good) books.
I think it's a book for someone that has already complete a fair amount of serious middle-game study.