Help studying Chess

If you are a newish player probably the best thing you can do (without a teacher or coach) is to do tactics problems.  There is nothing wrong with looking at master games, of course, but you will miss 90% of what is going on unless someone explains it (so do I, so does every low level player).  Amateur games are usually won and lost in the tactics, so hour for hour tactics study will get you the most bang for your buck.

Having said that, the famous coach Jeremy Silman recomends playing over large number of master games quickly.  Don't try to do deep analysis, again without a teacher most of it will just bounce off.  Rather, get a database, get 25 or 50 games for a particular opening or system, and go through them quickly, trying to absorb patters.  It will let you pick up general patters, common motifs and situations, etc, like in this opening white most often attacks on the kingside, particular square, files, or diagonals are repeatedly important, etc.  Its the kind of thing you expose yourself to alot and let it stew on the mental back burner.

Logical Chess Move by Move by Chernev - explains every move in understandable language.  Also, I have really appreciated Seirawan's Play Winning Chess, then Winning Chess Tactics - both pretty easy to follow and very helpful.

 I greatly like Chervnev's book as well.  Its not perfect, he can be a bit dogmatic about some things, but in general a beginner could do vastly worse than to follow his general advice.

 What do you guys think of this?  Is the exposure by itself enough to help much?

Yea I think there's some truth in this it can help you recognize some patterns but... if you could give it more time and actually try to understand the plan behind the moves I think it could help you more. 

I don't know Seirawan book - but maybe you could  try 'My system' by Nimzowitsch it's a classic that every chessplayer should read if he wants to improve.

Personally for the low-rated player I always recommend Silman's "The Amateur's Mind"...200+ rating points in that book in my opinion.

As for how to go through My 60 Memorable Games, there are a few things you can do. First, it helps to go through it with a stronger player to help explain things, and pull out some of the subtleties of the position. Sometimes I like to play "guess the move" with one player guessing the moves for one player (sometimes for both) and using the annotations to help refute ideas that are wrong. You have to have someone of sufficient strength to do this with no help, so if neither of the players are strong enough to guess the move, one can give hints: "develop a piece" or "develop a bishop" or " bishop move" and such. 

After going through a game, go back through it more quickly trying to determine what moves really affected the game..."so white playing c4 here weakened d4 to the point that black could access it with his knight, and that stopped white from coordinating his pieces..."...try to find the important moves and what they did. 

Yeah definitely - it's not so dificult to understand only downside of this book - it's not very 'entertaining' I mean it's rather dry and technical but Nimzowitsch commentaries and analysis are invaluable.

Gary Kasparov's books explain things very well.  If you pull up something like the analysis board, where they say why they're making certain moves, I'm sure it's very helpful, since you'd get insight into why they make the moves they do.  There's also a lot of topics : ).

here , have a read on this also there is two other parts by going to his homepage

http://www.chess.com/article/view/the-point-of-studying-master-games-part-one