Would You Recommend How to Reassess Your Chess by Silman?

How To Reassess Your Chess by Silman is.

VikrantPlaysD4: That's your opinion. I'm not the only one to complain about him babbling on quite a bit, going off on tangents (I'm talking in general, not only 'How to Reassess your Chess').

As for you other points, I'm not saying that you shouldn't do strategy. I was only saying that some of the stuff he drops for players with an online rating of below 1000 (which means that the player will be about E700 tops) is far too advanced for them - and then he's thoroughly dismissive of them for not seeing the ideas. As for your assertion that there's no more tactics for you to do after reaching E1084 (or a player with an online rating up to 1000, and I'm obviously paraphrasing you now), you'd be surprised how much there's left to learn about tactics and calculation.

'Finding the right move': You don't seem to get my point about this. What he says will just land the player in time trouble without any guarantees of him or her finding the best move. First of all, there might not be one. Secondly, a player at that level has typically not developed his/her intuition and positional judgement sufficiently to 'know' whether there's likely to be a solution or not in any particular situation. Identifying all critical positions at the board isn't easy, and even less so in the heat of battle. There are many excellent authors who discuss intuition and judgement in chess, such as Alexander Kotov (in his well-known series 'The Art of the Middle Game' and Think/Play/Train Like a Grandmaster') and Gerald Abrahams (in 'The Chess Mind'). As a matter of fact, it requires imbibing a lot of chess knowledge, from playing over master games, analysing one's own games, etc. Finally, in many positions, there isn't a single best move - quite often there are a number of good moves, where the difference between is just a matter of taste or personal proclivities. This is another thing that many highly regarded authors have pointed out, 'sometimes you just have to pick a move and get on with the game'.

Picking a move after 10 nano seconds: No, I categorically don't think that's what Silman is saying? My point doesn't concern move selection, but judgement. The point I'm making is that Silman wants his pupils to be very binary in his/her assessments/evaluations of positions, and no hesitation. This is just plain wrong. That's not really how human's think and it's very rarely helpful in assessing positions. There are nearly always gradations, and mitigating/compensating factors. (Which is also why the drawing margin is so wide in chess, or to once more quote Mikhail Tal: 'Plenty of minor are slips required before a position slides from slightly worse to clearly worse, and from clearly worse to lost.') Moreover, at our level (roughly up to E2250), we can rarely feel particularly certain about the evaluations of our positions - chances are we're quite wrong.

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I wouldn't go as far as to say that. It's quite useful for far stronger players, too.

4 years later

It's a good book if you're looking to get worse at chess!! I'm sorry I know Silman passed away recently but I have a very hard time showing someone respect who writes the same version of a book 4 times just to make money. Furthermore I went through his book and my rating went down by 150 ELO points. Lastly there's the argument that his methodology of thinking was the ideal way to approach the game of chess. Well if that were true how come he never got his Grandmaster title? That's the highest level of achievement in chess so that says something about his approach to the game of chess. If you want to read a good chess book pick up Logical Chess by Irving Chernov. Every move is explained in detail and will make the reader much more aware of what's transpiring in their games plus the games which they're studying.

For tactics, maybe.

For strategy, no book compares to Pawn Power in Chess by Hans Kmoch.

There are more books written on chess than any other subject matter in human history. I'm sure that they're many good chess books out there to be studied. Silman just isn't amongst that list.