Have you EVER really finished reading any Chessbook??

Bobby Fischer!

Yes! Because I'm so bored at mealtimes, I read them every time I eat! Cover to cover, regardless of purpose of the book.

Pawn Power in Chess - by Hans Kmoch, some 35 years ago...

nah man, future of chess is interactive e-books, I really don't like having to use a board while reading

Yes, I can only conclude that pfren is joking.

When i read an opening book i use always a chessboard.

Nope.

paulgottlieb wrote:

I recall reading a GM saying that when he was an up and coming player studying under some famous player/teacher at his first lesson the coach threw the ECO at him saying -- read this. Groaning,  off he went and read it and came back and the coach said good! very good! Read it again! -- No doubt a bit of an exaggeration for effect, but the point being, I think, that chess players working at the game with an eye towards playing professionally at some point commit to learning A LOT OF BOOK.  A normal person can't read ECO cover to cover without it taking a very long and IMO very useless time -- but a person whose blindfold rating is say 2200, could do it in a much more reasonable way. 

Pfren is probably spoofing (his saying that he "only had ECO" is a bit much)-- but I think it's possible he's semi-serious. And I just don't think it's unheard of for a would-be professional player to have gone thru that whole freaking thing at some point. (I sometimes wonder about the work of the guys who put these books together back in the day -- DeFirmian, Pachman, etc. They did so without electronic databases or computers -- they used cardfiles! Jeezus. Pachman iirc was famous for being a walking opening library.) 

At the (rather great) risk of going on too long, consider this:  

Most of us can read text without moving our lips -- we "hear" the language in our heads -- it's not impressive -- well actually it's damned impressive it's just so common and expected we take it for granted. But many people freak out thinking of Beethoven composing music while deaf, as if it's a singular act of incredible genius. Not really. (It's his music that's the proof and product of incredible genius.) If a great author went deaf at 40 it would be a personal tragedy but would you expect him to stop writing? It's quite similar with Beethoven and not unique. Top conductors (GMs of the music world?) can read an orchestral score and hear a symphony. At a less exalted level many many people can read a musical score for an instrument they've mastered and "hear" the content.  I have no doubt that most very strong chessplayers (and the weakest IM is damn strong)... can read columns of moves with an ease similar to that of a professional orchestral musican reading his part. An ease and fullness of comprehension an amateur musician and chessplayer like myself finds nearly incomprehensible.

I still find it extremely doubtful...and as an NM, I'm presumably not light-years away from a "weak" IM. 

It's what pfren says he is...I'm guessing it's like a gentle wolverine. 

The first chess book I ever read was Reinfeld's "The Complete Chess Course". That and "Pandolfini's Chess Complete" are the only chess books I've ever read through completely. But that was long ago, when I gave a damn.

It's deffinetly hard for opening refrence books im sure cause sometimes the time it takes for the book to be published and avalabile to someone probably 60%+ of the lines are already outdated and more or less a lesser percent of the lines are sometimes already refuted!! anyone NM(2200+) im sure has a REALLY hard time finding good opening books to keep up there play.

Well, I certainly hope you don't (the shame would be unbearable).

I still say those letters are crap.

yes chessmaster102 i agree its the reason the technology age is such a blessing and curse at the same time cause your able to access more opening knowledge faster yet at the same time it takes up alot of your time cause if it doesn't then you'll fall behind not to mention Fritz13 cloud feature makes masters jobs ever so easy/hard cause now you'll have people looking at the same ideas your looking at but you can also do the same  (if you have Fritz13).  I would suggest the best book to deal with the enigma chessmaster presented above is Emmanuel Laskers Common Sense in chess and Ruebin Fine's Ideas behind the openings that way masters (im guessing) no matter how recent a opening book is will tell if the lines inside a book actually hold some promise or overall will end up in the Refuted Bin.

 @ #41 ~ #44

Yeah I did too. But then, I never thought it would happen to me... 

I have read two:

How to Play Chess - Kevin Wicker - FM

This book is informative and to the point for beginners. It goes over the rules and fundamentals.

Pandolfini's Ultimate Guide to Chess - Bruce Pandolfini - NM

This book to is good for beginners to intermediate players. I have to admit I was disappointed after seeing the title and then reading it. I was hoping for more in the way of strategy at higher levels. Otherwise, it wasn't a bad read.

My favorite line ever...this guy picks up a couple of female hitchhikers:  "After about a half an hour the girls were feeling frisky and they took off their clothes."

Yea but you also have to take into account that lines considered refuted in the past continusly get rived every now and then. To me its usually how someone's PERSPECTIVE on an opening is cause in the past im sure some masters looked at the Breyer variation in the Ruy Lopez and though "Blah taking my knight back to its original square this variation will be refuted in a month or to" yet today the variation is still played at the highst level of someone can look at 1.e3 and say "blah not even taking a hold of the center and then someone else can come along and say 1.e3 "hmm the french defense with a extra tempo I love this opneing" and then again someone else can come along and say "blah the extra tempo isn't even worth anything this garbage" and over and over again continuosly. PERSPECTIVE is the key word to me and my evidence is the fact that the hypermodern school was created from players haveing diffrent perspective on things.