books

hi to all chess lovers out there. I need your opinion about the book,RAPID CHESS IMPROVEMENT,HOW TO BUILD YOUR CHESS OPENING REPERTOIRE,HOW TO REASSESS YOUR CHESS. Do you think guys is worth it to buy all these books?for what ratings are those books? Especially rapid chess improvement.thanks in advance.

A book writen by Patrrick Wolff past USA Champion =The chess novice for beginers= Barns and Noble about 30.00

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Go to amazon, look up each book and check out the reviews of them by satisfied (and unsatisfied) customers

I haven't read the books you're asking about, but I have read My System by Nimzovitch which I highly recommend

ive always heard that my system, what does it have?

read my first post again

thanks. what other books do u have?

awesome link

shame he used it wrong

Books are totally useless. Nakamura, a 2700+ player, never read one. Then what they don't tell you is that GMs or IMs are not even able to analyse correctly a position without an Engine. The 3rd edition of How to reassess your chess was full of blunders that the writer wasn't even able to see, and he was an IM. But it is true also for GMs, today in order to be sure they got it right they need to pass the position under 2-3 different engines, and that shows you how little the so called pros know.

It is better to buy a training software, and play endless games against strong engines. One of my friends also never read a book, just played against Chessmaster, and guess what? At his first tournament his rating was above 1900.

No on the first.

Maybe on the second.

Yes on the third.

Books are valuable. especially if they are good books. The first book on your list is part of a confidence game designed to produce burnout among chess players. The author gave up the game while he was writing it.

I have lots of books, and many of them on openings. They have helped my game a little.

Silman's books, endgame books, tactics books have helped my game a lot.

I'm sorry if you live in a place which is not civilized enough to accept other people's opinion. Or maybe it was your parents who weren't able to give you good manners.

Now, if you are being civilized, could you tell me which statements I have made in my post to which you disagree with? Eventually, you need to prove your point. For example, if you say that nowadays GMs and IMs don't write books using engines to correct their work, I can easily dismount such argument showing you the titles in which the authors gave the name of the engines they used.

Not another disagreement, please.

As a former teacher, I can assure you that different people have different learning styles - auditory, visual, tactile, etc.  People with short attention spans learn better by repetition, those with longer spans learn better by analysis and understanding.  There is no "right" answer here.

While Nakamura may have never read a book, he did study (as I understand) under a family chess coach who in turn may have read books.  If one does not learn from the past (coaches, books, other players) then that person is doomed to "reinvent the wheel" from the beginning and make all the mistakes made by millions of players over the past centuries.  One example does not make a general rule, of course.  I think Nakamura is an exception if that statement is in fact accurate.  How can we determine if that is true?  Does it matter to the rest of us with diverse learning styles? 

Many of us do not have, nor can we afford to pay a coach to teach us when we play for fun, not for money or status.  Online sites, OTB play and books are the alternative.  Books give us different styles, different philosophies, different ideas and examples of mistakes to avoid.

I am not a strong player - too old now - but I doubt that a chess engine rated over 3000 can duplicate the creativity and psychological nuances that a GM uses to prepare for a given opponent.  Engines search far more deeply than humans can think, but not always accurately as several complex endgames have demonstrated recently.  They also assume the "best" countermove which an OTB player will not always make no matter how strong, so the move that may be "best" at move 20 and the following 24-ply depth is sometimes meaningless when the opponent doesn't follow with the "best" countermove.

The post by @ermannoc is typical of a young player enamourated by the UCI's and chess engines of today.  If you limit play to online computer chess tournaments, then books are in fact probably useless.  However for most of us, OTB is where it's at and arguably the only true measure of chess skill.  And you can't use a computer to play OTB - unless you wear dark glasses and cheat.

Thanks, @pfren.  Obviously I do not play computer chess tournaments, though I am casually aware of some of the engine weaknesses.

I do disagree that their teaching value is "next to zero" however.  I use them as a backup double-check after analyzing my own games.  At my level, obviously far lower than yours, they can occasionally suggest a line I did not see.

Which brings up another topic, I guess, and that is "how long should you spend doing post-game analysis before you have mined all you can from it?"  Yes, it depends on the position and the complexity.  But spending hours on one position is reaching toward the law of diminishing returns.  A fairly quick run through with an engine can break that time barrier and give fresh insights - not always the best perhaps - but something not previously considered as a candidate move.

But we digress ...

I have read My System and I own a yet-unread copy of HTRYC, 4th Ed.  by Silman which I purchased based on wide-spread recommendations.  In light of the criticism of earlier versions of HTRYC  for inaccuracies by some, I would assume that Silman has corrected those errors, if in fact they were such.  Comparison of the 4th Ed. with a copy of the 2nd I've seen shows it to be almost completely re-written.  I haven't seen any reviews on the 4th. with regard to errors.

Forgive me the harsh tone, but I would like to illustrate some points in my disagreement. In US I have experienced a lot of hypocrisy (I'm not making personal attacks, just stating facts, eventually please correct me, and if I use the wrong pronoun, don't take it personal). Teachers (I'm speaking at college/Uni level) often administer tests where they ask which kind of learner the student is, but at the end of the day (or bottom line) there are only BOOKS. Maybe because publishers are not really interested in changing the way they publish the information for the different learners. The fact is that they ask the student to buy a "textbook" not an mp3 version or a video or whatever other style could exist.

For chess you have to re-invent the wheel everytime, because there is no way to determine if reading Nimzowitsch centralization examples from his games, will give you the actual knowledge of how putting that concept into practice. For this reason I mentioned training software. Because a software could make the positional example and then give a good number of exercises to see if the student is able to put that concept into practice. But please mention who reading a book like My System or the Praxis of my system was able to actually become a better player. Petrosjan was sleeping with it, memorized all the games, and like in his solid style expressed the opinion that Nimzowitsch was too passionate to prove the point. Which was an euphemism for saying that most of his example were refuted by Petrosjan homework analysis, and were not correct. But of course also for learning the checkmates you have to reinvent the wheel with every student, since there is no way to magically pass the checkmate pattern from a book to the brain.

A student must practice, and then one day will see it automatically.

For how GMs prepares nowadays, I'm sure it is no secret that also the actual world champion finds his opening novelties thanks to a computer. And surely he wouldn't go to play a game before checking a line with a computer, since he would have a bitter surprise.

Notice also that Kortchnoi one of the best players in the world for a long time, had difficulties adjusting to the new generations, till his wife didn't set a computer for him, and that opened his eyes to a new way of learning. The result was that he became, once again, a player to be feared, also at his old age, by the new generation of GMs.

Just to be sure, I'm not here to convince you. You can continue to read chess books and waste your time. On the other hand: I and other players will use all the possible technological ways to learn more about chess, and become better players, while discarding something which evidently is not working like books. (or that is working less, since probably everything works, but we do have limited amounts of time with the hectic lives we live)

Silman copied from Euwe and Pachman for the 3rd edition, thinking that the analysis made by those giants were correct. But then the publisher began to receive letters by reader who with just Fritz8 were refuting the analysis made by Silman (not knowing he just plagiarized them). Silman rewrote the book and guess what he used to correct his analysis?

Did he use 2-3 GMs? No. Did he use 2-3 IMs? NO

He used Fritz12 and Rybka 3 (check page XI of the 4th edition).

So Pfren can be upset for what I write, and he has the right to be upset, but doesn't change the facts.

My uncle smoked 3 packs of cigarettes a day for 30+ years and he's doing fine. So let's dismiss lung cancer, shall we?

I don't see it as an "either-or" question.  I use books at the same time as a computer.  I either load PGN files of games illustrated in the book (if available) or enter the game/position into the computer and use the dialog from the book while using the computer in "analysis" mode to look for alternate lines and/or check for errors or better lines than the books.  I also set up a chess board for analysis of complete games.

Unless you handicap a computer engine, you will nearly always lose.  So what is the advantage to always losing, or alternately playing against a computer that is less than full strength?  And if you do handicap the computer by limiting search time and/or depth, why does that always give you the "best" move?  Clearly, there are more than one good move, otherwise computers would have solved the game of chess and we would no longer need to play it.

Computers do not and cannot teach strategy, and they are of limited value in teaching evaluation of board position and why certain moves are to be considered.  The problem is in converting brute number crunching analysis into human thought patterns and learning instruction.  Human authors do that well, computers do not.  We need to know HOW to pick a better move, not WHAT the theoretical "best" move is based on a computer programmer's best algorithm.  That is of potential value only during after-game analysis.

So both systems have their place and advantage.  If you ask any of hundreds of chess coaches and teachers, what would they say?

The problem is that you are cheating. Since you are not able to evaluate what the authors write, and till "yesterday" would have believe it blindly, because couldn't refute it. If you want to do an experiment, read the books, and DON'T use an engine, let's see after how many years you realize the mistakes written in books not checked by engines.

Today you say "computer are just brute force..." (Which is not true by the way, we are not in the 90ies anymore) but you depend on them to know if the analysis made by that author is correct.

And the "you" is not personal, since like you, Silman, and every other GM, IM, and hundreds of coaches out there depend too, since they know, that also a weak engine (not Houdini) can trash them 10 times out of 10 in seconds, all the time. I believe the Ivanov case is clear, the guy lost the game only when there were video problems, or they stopped the video of the game, otherwise he was crushing GM after GM (with all their invented strategies, and their plans after the opening LOL) with games who wouldn't last 35 moves.

So it is not a question either/or, a logical fallacy, we know that books unfortunately are not the way to learn chess, for those like us, amateurs.

For GMs I do agree it is different, because they study all their lives, maybe 8 hours a day, under different coaches, and then the main difference is nerves and memory. Carlsen, Fischer, Kasparov, all have photograpic memory, and steel endurance.

The value of playing hudreds of games against an engine, and lose, is seen only in your OTB games, because there you will see the difference.

Again I'm speaking for those who care to reach 1900-2000 OTB, not for those with GM/IM dreams.

You make a strong case, and I agree that technology has changed things -- but that doesn't mean books are useless. Analysis trees aside, you can learn a lot of strategic principles from books. Plus, it's just nice to hear from a great chess player. It doesn't even have to be about learning chess, it can just be a glimpse into their life and way of thinking and playing. Just reading someone's story can give you better chess ideas. And plus, chess isn't necessarily about playing "theoretically perfect" moves. Especially at the amateur level. Let's not take the human element out of chess.