Would You Recommend How to Reassess Your Chess by Silman?

At least you're consistent and hate all highly regarded literature universally.

You use the low price of the book as evidence it isn't good.  This is flawed.  Prices of books have to do more with the amount of copies in circulation.

Besides, I regularly check the used shelves for chess books and have never seen a two or three dollar Silman book you claim are all over the place.

Godspawn: I'm rambling about Tactics as, stylistically, an extremely positional player, so I don't think I apply to your analogy. I love the kind of stuff he talks about. But he didn't do what would actually give me more wins: gear my mind to combine tactics and strategy together...

In fact, he actually tells you not to calculate until you have a plan... problem is, in order to find a good plan, you have to find an idea that gives you tactical threats, else it's not a plan that will make your opponent uncomfortable! Moreover, if you find a tactic that wins a piece any time spent on a deep plan is unnecessary. I see what he was trying to do, but let's face it, his concepts have flaws and he didn't think things totally through when he suggested that thinking technique. It's not a sin or anything.

 I agree with you completely, but would add that in my opinion every great player is worth studying (from Petrosian to Tal) because they can all teach us how to play effectively. Sometimes you have to attack, sometimes you have to defend, sometimes you have to sacrifice, sometimes you have to grind, etc. We all have preferences about how we want to play, but sometimes the position demands a certain course of action and it pays to become comfortable with all possible ways of winning or saving a game.

The topic is about opinions, and those who have one will surely point out a reason they are right. I believe it's more or less pointless to try to dissuade someone about his opinion, because it's a matter of personal preference. It's better to show your opinion instead, and recommend other books if you don't like this one. I believe this will be more useful.

Although I prefer Chessimo's methodology of short strategy problems over any book by far, the gist I got from Amateur's Mind is that you simply evaluate your imbalances, which automatically leads to a candidate move list, and then proceed to calculate lines from those candidates, which automatically includes evaluating mates/tactics/threats. 

Now it is true that if you slavishly adhere to this, you may miss an opportunity to immediately checkmate your opponent or win material or you may miss your opponents' mates/tactics against you.  But if you don't have a structured way of thinking when you can't see a tactics (whether because you suck or it isn't there) then your moves are essentially random stomping ("if I sac my queen, then...no...what if I plant my bishop here so that with my knight, they will...no...I'll advance my pawn so that if he takes I'll bring my knight here and then my queen is free to checkmate if he...no...I guess I'll just push this other pawn, I don't think he can mate me or steal material if I do that, yeah that's it, push the pawn, something will happen, hopefully good for me"). 

What I thought Silman meant was that you balance your study plan with a little bit of positional play (like his books), endgame (like his book), with some tactics (many books, servers, software for this) and openings (many sources for these).  People are weak players because they miss immediate AND intermediate AND long-term threats, but over time with a balanced study plan and structured thinking method, you iron these out and more quickly intuit when there is a tactic for or against you or when the position "seems" like it has a tactic brewing.   

With Silman's method, he argues that at early stages you are already structuring your thinking like a GM, even if you don't have their mental stores of patterns, memorized positions, or analytical skills/speed. 

Silman may have been better off creating a Complete Tactics Course and a Complete Strategy Course, both subdivided by rating, to go with his Complete Endgame Course, to get his point across.

Aren't many of those problems like 30+ moves long and very cumbersome because chess mentor on the internet is slow (it is exponentially faster on the disc; I wish they'd update the disc), and if you are wrong, he says useless things like "you clearly aren't thinking of a plan" and then you have to click the "Try Again" button, and therefore just a single strategy problem takes 30-45 very painful minutes?   If, on the other hand, most of his problems are like Chessimo's shorter 1-2 move problems illustrating a single strategic concept "with other variables suppressed" (Chessimo's stated intention for its strategy course), I may have to peruse it.

I agree. Books are only guidelines of study to a game that if we wanted to could study completely on our own. When a position is presented it's not like they own that position, of course . You don't need to go outside to explore the game; if you have a board, everything there is to discover is right in front of you

That must be another of his strategy courses...I remember reading it in a course description once because I was doing adaptive mode and I suddenly got this problem that took me 32 minutes and I was all Butthead-like, "what the hell is this crap?", and then I went to the course list to read the description and it said that there were many long problems, and that immediately turned me off from adaptive mode, but I'll check out the course you are talking about. Thanks.

“Chess books should be used as we use glasses: to assist the sight, although some players make use of them as if they thought they conferred sight”

(Jose Raul Capablanca)

I think this has been a very informative thread posters have made detailed points for and against silmans approach, It is really up to the individual to decide whom they prefer to read and study from.  i think silmans approach, sure made AMATUERS MIND very difficult for me to put down and i have referred that book to some of my opponents on this site, and now these guys come back telling me "They  Gonna Take Me Out !! " LOL 

lol, that's so cool -- I guess I made a similar observation to Capablanca's!

I was the guy who said that beginners do not need Siman's book on imbalances, just tons and tons of tactics puzzles. Well, I think I am about to eat my own words.

No doubt, tactics have really helped me in Live Chess. But now I am playing my first Turn Based/Correspondence game after many months away from it.

I'm finding myself looking at imbalances. Ouch! I am looking at the elements, like time, space and mobility. I am in search of weaknesses for both sides.  I am looking at dream positions before any calculation. Very important.  And, I am in search of targets and finally, a plan.

I am only involved in one game right now, and it was quite unexpected. I'm not asking for any comments, as this game is in progress, and that would go against the rules. I post this diagram simply to illustrate how Silman's book would come in quite handy right now, so, I have it open right now. 

Seven moves have been played, with no captures yet! I'm playing Black.

I look forward to posting this game one more time at the conclusion, with my sincere thanks to the gazillions of hours Silman has spent writing some of the very best books on the market for the amatuer chess player.

Yes, chess is a series of positions which players present to each other. If you are able to calculate 5 moves ahead with no mistake, but you can't evaluate the resulting position correctly, you'll have wasted your time. Not to mention that you need position evaluation mechanics while doing the calculation itself.

If you can't see tactics, then you won't know whether to judge if an attack will work or not. You may think an attack is coming more slowly than it actually is. So there is an example of how tactics are a key facilitator of correct judgment.

@Muskiamole: Indeed, it is much easier to get away with a lack of tactical skill in correspondence games with analysis boards

A tactic is a sequence of moves that improves the position (by winning material, space, tempo or another advantage), so a tactic's quality is dependant on the positions' difference. Seeing tactics is seeing the positions you can come up with, and vise versa. But it's better to have a positional intention before calculating (some kind of plan), so that you won't have to rely only on circumstances.

"But it's better to have a positional intention before calculating (some kind of plan), so that you won't have to rely only on circumstances."

Well, it's good to have one. But we have to be more pragmatic. We don't want to waste 5 minutes on making a plan if we can win a piece right away. Personally I think you should do a nice tactics scan both at the beginning of your decision-making process and right before you actually play your intended move. But the irony is that although many say a good position will allow you more tactical opportunities, it can go the other way around -- sometimes your sense of the general availability of tactics (meaning, you can create lots of threats and thus control the game) is what enables you to make a correct positional statement -- for example, if the pawn structure is symmetrical and the only difference is that white has a couple more active pieces, and black will catch up in development in just two more moves, how large of an advantage does white have? Most likely, we would just need to see if white could give black tactical problems that would either start an attack, or keep black from developing because otherwise he'd allow a tactic. Otherwise, if black catches up without allowing a big attack, we can say black is fine. In this case tactics was a very important tool with which to make a positional assessment.

So it follows that if you don't scan for general tactical ideas, that you may use for your plan later on, you might not make as effective of a plan because you're not recognizing the dynamism of your pieces as much. All tactical ideas incorporate a utilization of piece mobility, so if you notice and understand the possible tactics in the position, you get a good feel for how your pieces are generally coordinating, which should help point to a plan of action.

Yeah, Silman is such an idiot - he believes in the existence of something I fail to see! Clearly my 1800 rating is the highest achievable degree of chess understanding, and anyone higher than that is only there because they can spot knight forks faster than me. I bet his IM title is fake because he sucks so bad and I know so much more about chess than him.

Although his Silman bashing was uncalled for, his part about computers is not a bad point. Computers, although they can only rely on huge amounts of calculation and don't have a real system of strategy, they can often make moves where it looks like they did have a plan after all! That is because they have become so strong that brute force is not so ineffective!

On the other hand of course, grandmasters used to be able to beat computers back a decade or two ago; the computers still must have been able to calculate thousands of times faster (which is a lot), yet the efficiency of the grandmaster helped him make the computers look like fools.

So there is a certain balance. But they show that it is possible to hit upon what we would call a good strategy by calculating tons of moves, as long as of course you are able to calculate at least a couple million variations per second!

That is so true!; Silman is so stupid, he can't even beat Houdini, let alone Houdini 1.5!

But seriously dude, there's no reason to get involved in religious discussion here.