Even I don't think books does helps me. It only gives annotated games, and a lot of useful information that you can recall when playing. But will not help you to win the game.
For me the best thing I've done is to analyze the games I played.
And studying various of typical positions such as isolani pawn structure and so on.
Best to do a little work each day, and it will build up. Regularly play in OTB tournaments (long time control) and always analyse your games (without a computer at first) and try to pick the brains of stronger players (post mortem at the tourney, at the club, in chess.com analysis forum, wherever). Yes it's also good to be going through a book. I woudln't expect to be suddenly strong after a book though, you need to play long games to incorporate the new knowledge into your games.
Any one thing I did? For a stretch of time I set aside 5-8 hours a day and worked though one tactics book (Ultimate Chess Puzzle Book) and one endgame book (Dvoretsky's). Took notes, reviewed the notes, etc. From the visualization skills alone I noticed a difference. But I found out too that this is not very practical, and not the best method for learning. Burnout aside, you learn better if you do a little bit each day over the course of years. And an indispensable part of training must be playing tournament games... or tournament like games (OTB, long time controls, 4-5 hours for 1 game).
In my case I improved a lot my chess skill after solving 1000 checkmate positions...go on tactics!
I gained a bunch of rating points after I sacrificed a bunch of 1200-rated players to the Chess goddess, Caissa.
I gained a bunch of rating points after I sacrificed a bunch of 1200-rated players to the Chess goddess, Caissa.
haha cool! and one of the best ways to gain some points is frying baby chess chickens..
Is there any one thing that you did that you noticed you got a ton better after reading/doing? I'm a C class player looking to get better, but so far think I've gotten nothing from any books I've ever read. How about you guys?