The worst chess book I've ever read, and why...

The most typos I have ever seen in chess books are those in chess books written by Jack Spence.  Many of the games cannot be reconstructed because of missing moves or wrong or bad moves.

Maybe I'm a fan of "How To Think Ahead In Chess", relatively speaking, because it was one of my first chess books. Maybe your first chess book, regardless of how good/bad it is for a serious player, is always good, because it helps you enough so that you can beat whoever you've been playing for awhile. It doesn't matter if the book is complete, in a sense of recommending a repertoire. What matters is that the book shows to you that chess is more than about trying to fork the king and rook with the horsie. It must be easy to read. It should make some simple tactical points, and throw in some positional points. It must choose games which support this theme.

To the poster above who liked Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess - this is probably the same point here. A good book for a beginner will not be a good book for anybody else. Maybe you can read BFTC first, then read HTTAIC, and then get on with it. Hey at least you'll know that when someone opens 1.d4 d5 2.e3 they've only read one book!

I don't know how anyone can like Amatuers Mind.  That book was terrible, always talking about vague "imbalances."  I need something more tangible...something more real when i spend money on a book.  Now that I am more experienced I see what silman was trying to get at but even when i reread it now it still sucks.  I think it would be very, VERY DIFFICULT for an amateur player to ingest the concepts in that book and play them appropriately on the board.  So it gets your mind thinking about all these imbalances but you're not skilled enough to make the appropriate moves.

I think that book hurts more than it helps if your rating is under 1800 or so.   Because of that...its the worst chess book ever

I've thought about writing a book (actually about backgammon, but the format would work with chess too).

It would be workbook-style. A position goes on the left page - ask for a move, and preferably the reason why. The old axiom the more you put in the more you get out is certainly true here. Then on the right page you show maybe three possible moves, along with some possible "why"s of why someone would choose those moves. In some cases, you can eliminate one of the moves as bad (for tactical, positional, or some other reason), and very likely you'd have a "best" move. Sort of like a format of Solitaire Chess in Chess Life, but not the same game. But if you wanted, you could have similar positions in one chapter. You could even ask for each position "who is better", and then try to teach the student about a certain class of positions in this manner.

Maybe it would be best as a teaching assistant. But I'm envisioning a chapter on the IQP. (Isolated Queen's Pawn.) Explain at the outset that whoever dominates the square right in front of the pawn likely has the better position. Give some examples showing this, along with some variations. Give some exceptions. Give some attacking and defending examples. Maybe conclude the chapter with a hard-fought draw where many of the themes come into play.

Again, I think this works better with backgammon, for those of you who play it, because the positions are generally much more simple. It's pretty easy to look at a position for a short time and understand what you should be striving for. It's unlikely there would be more than three candidate moves in backgammon.

I suppose you could even write a book like this for poker, or even some other games. Ideas?

I disagree. To quote the book, "After giving a student basic mating patterns and strategies, you must begin feeding him/her andvanced concepts. At first these ideas will not make sense; many players will have a vague idea of what you are talking about and nothing more. However, even a fragmented understanding of these concepts will prove useful, and eventually they will experience a marked increase in strength as these lessons are absorbed by repetition and example."

Wow, I completely disagree. The Amateur's mind should do the opposite, make the concepts you learn digestible and actually showing what mistakes the amateurs made in trying to apply silman's lessons. However I think if one is going to read the amateur's mind, they should also read how to reasses your chess, which covers the imbalances (or differences, whatever you want to call them, Silman's point is just that your plan should be based on your advantages or weaknesses) more thoroughly but without the "amateur help".

This Crazy World of Chess by Larry Evans. It's not an instructional book. I bought it because the cover said, "After reading this controversial book, you'll never look at chess the same way again." And from the introduction, "Hang on tight, you're in for a wild romp through the back door of chess." I was expecting some interesting insider stuff but instead got a collection of Evan's crappy newspaper articles

 I fully agree, but then an amazon.com reviewer correctly points out that:

"At $9.95 and 294 pages, you, the chess afficionado, are contemplating purchasing a compilation of reprinted articles (circa 2002-2006), usually 1¼ pages in length at a bargain price of approximately . 03 cents per page."

 Yes, the book is crappy, but at least it is cheap. By the way, my unfavorable review of the book was censored by amazon.com, for no good reason. In it, I simply mentioned books that deserve more attention, such as Hofmann's "King's Gambit." They didn't even publish it.

Regarding Pandolfini, I have to say that for the most part I've really enjoyed his writings, although honestly it was from his old chess life articles.   I do enjoy reading about chess, rather than studying it at times.

Come on peeps, I know there are other books out there that you've read or are reading that are horrible.  Please tell us what they are!

"The Complete Chess Course" by Fred Reinfeld. Potential readers should stay away from the chapter "How to Play King Pawn Openings", as the analysis offered is not only dated (obviously, since the book was published in the 1980s) but contains erroneous evaluations of many lines (e.g. The Two Knights Defence). Otherwise the book is passable, as it handles the key concepts fairly well. Example games, however, leave much to be desired, since analysis begins fairly late into the game.

Looks like I have the British edition, copyright Sterling Publishing Co. Inc., 1983. No mention of 1959, but undoubtedly there was an earlier US edition.

wow, I totally forgot that I have this book.  I haven't looked at in probably 30 years, but I remember that it was useful to me in that it introduced me to a lot really basic ideas that I had no idea about. 

I know there are more crappy chess books out there....tell me please!

I think Fred died in 1964!  

Reinfeld taught a lot of us how to play chess, and the friendly enthusiastic tone of his books made a big difference in how I saw the game... I just wish he hadn't taught such a take-no-chances style of chess. But I suppose that's what worked for him.  

It's true what you say, but the problem is that so much of his work was really not very good quality.  I refer to my origianl diatribe here (op, od :))  "how to think ahead in chess". 

What a piece of racid meat that was.