How to Study with Chess Books

Thanks for the info Odinspirit. I bought Fritz a couple months ago and I haven't scratched the surface of what it can do it would seem. :) Been wondering the best way of going through the books I've been buying of late(it's addicting isn't it?).

This may help some people that are older, and think their short term memory is bad. That could be a bad sign for you by the way.

The way I was taught in school on learning definitions of words, was to write it out 3 times, while saying it out loud, and using it in sentences. This does help reinforce it to long term memory more.

Another way to work on your short term memory is to play concentration (the card game). Use 2 decks of the exact same type.  Mix them up, and place them face down, and then pick one at a time, and try to match them to their mate. Its better if you play against someone, but you can play solitaire as well. This is a helpful game to improve your short term memory, unless you have a disease, and even then it may help some. Good luck.

Basically you get better in things you train.

If you just read the book without doing any work yourself, as if it were a textbook on some subject, you will gain some knowledge but you won't actually get better at chess. After all, chess isn't about who knows the most, but about who makes the best decisions, and you didn't train that.

If you read it and go through all variations in your head, you will also get better at going through variations in your head. You still won't actually improve your chess playing.

If you treat every diagram as an exercise, get out a board, set up the position and try to decide for yourself what you would play, including trying to find all relevant variations that need calculating -- then you'll improve, as that is the sort of thing that you need to do during a game as well, and you're training it. A game in the book is then a series of exercises, with answers. If the book's annotations after the diagram don't explain why your move was wrong, the book is probably not aimed at your level of play.

Doing it at every move (solitaire chess) is possible too, but tedious, and most books don't have explanations for every move so if you chose something else you may not know whether you just chose another reasonable move or a blunder. Most books have explanations below the diagrams.

So I use "every diagram is an exercise, always" as the rule.