Is playing chess otb as useful/more useful than reading books??

I find otb better than books for openings. I play in a club and league, I find most of the guys play very tactically. This means they hardly ever play a line because they don't know it and in some cases the positions don't even look remotely like the positions in the book.  I've found that occasionally a book may point out a tactic but the books normally ignore tactics since the average 1800 plus player wouldn't fall into the trap. The other problem is that the book looks at maybe only 2-3 variations sometimes with only a small advantage or disadvantage and then illustrate with a master game which is in a league in another galaxy. A book written at lower level would be hard since it would have to say '5.Kc6 is hardly ever played by anyone at your level', something a chess coach could do but not a book.

So I learn the common moves  people of my level make via otb and live chess. I stick to a set openings and have used books for general positions and not variations. The best books I have used are positional books by people like Silman.

I have also found that I can remember moves and positions in openings much better via otb then anything online, maybe something to do with how the brain stores info in multiple sites?

BTW I'm not on commission but I had excellent lessons from Valeri Lilov and gave me massive confidence in my openings.

No problem, i was in the same position (no pun intended) myself!

High - especially if he grants you a post-mortem.

hello

Kapablanca did not study openings. But he observed carefully what other participants of the tournament played. So if you are talanted as Kapablanca, you can do the same. Personaly I studied openings with  my coach and read many books.