Chess books

What chess books would you recommend for openings, middle games,openings etc. I don't know what to get.

How to play:

How to Reassess Your Chess by Jeremy Silman

The Amateur's Mind by Jeremy Silman

Simple Chess by Stean

Modern Chess Strategy by Pachman

 

How to think:

Chess For Zebras by Rowson

 

Opening books that capture the soul of chess:

Understanding the Grunfeld by Rowson

The Italian Gambit by Jude Acers

Play 1.b3 by Odessky

Pirc Alert! by Alburt and Chernin

Two Knights; A Chess Killing Machine by Bussom

 

Game collection:

100 Selected Games by Botvinnik

You should get 'My System' by Nimzowitsch. The author is kind of eccentric, but it is a positional classic that covers very important themes. If you can get through it, I'm sure you will improve a lot!

You should also use game explorer on chess.com to familiarize yourself with the way masters have played your favorite lines. This is a good way to study openings, but you shouldn't limit yourself only to that method.

Especially Dvoretsky's endgame manual. That is supposed to be for like 2200 players I think. Maybe a bit lower. I'd suggest Silman's endgame book instead of Dvoretsky's.

 I am a 1412 USCF!

'My System' alone got me from like 1700 to 2000 (online chess) in about a year. I started thinking about positions with a lot more clarity after reading it. You don't need many books but I highly reccomend it to any player of any level.

I intend on acquiring all these on Amazon presently.

I think the best thing you can do to get better is to start playing slow chess. Whenever you make a move train yourself to look at all the possible good candidate moves for the position, and consider all your opponents best replies. A good book to learn a good algorithm for thinking up of good moves is to pick up Dan Heismans book, a guide to chess improvement. In that book he talks about 5 fundamentals that you should master before you start doing more intermediate stuff. It'd be nice to know a lot of openings, but if you blunder your pieces or get checkmated in the middle game all the time, the answer probably does not lie on developing your opening knowledge.

Of course couple reading any book with playing a lot of games, and giving some time to first analyze them yourself, then taking them to a computer.

Richard Reti, Masters of the Chessboard

OP, seriously-Don't you Lurk at other threads? you should!

if you did you'd know there's great disagreement about good books amongst chess players.

saying that want "good books" 

is like saying you want healthy food, or beautiful art

its hopelessly vague... and there is SO much disagreement among the fans of this and that.