Is Silman's way of playing chess really how strong players play?

I think i can judge is his endgame book, if i remember correctly he even explain the lucena and philidor position better than minerv rook endgame book.

Anyway i think from all endgame books Silman his hands down the best, i dont know about his other books so much. 

Well it takes a master to find the flaws i guess and he is so popular, if there were flaws others would have pointed them out. 

from some position from his other books, even so i might not fully have found the plan. Still his lines sometimes convinced me afterwards that it might be the best and only way. But as i said only a master can judge that.

But anyway that being said even if he is really good, i dont know if it is enough you might have to study it a million times like chess tactics to be able to play like that. Some stuff is still really complicated

I think Silman is perfect for beginners, because he knows how to explain things in very simple terms.  But I do have difficulty thinking about what he calls "imbalances".  It's the word itself which throws me off.  He seems to be referring to relative strengths and weaknesses of the two players, and the word "imbalance" does not seems to fit properly.  But I have never heard anyone else say this, so perhaps it is just me?

In his book he defines "imbalance" as any difference between the two positions.  His book HTRYC is about forming a plan around these differences between the two sides which highlight your pluses / minimize your weakness.

I think it's very logical and reasonable... not to do his method as rigidly as he says, but to form plans based on the trumps you have in the position.  This may be too dull/bulky/inexact for titled players but for amateurs who have never even though about playing with a plan much less how to form one, this is a useful book.

I think by imbalance he means positional and material factors/features/advantages. It´s quite neat for beginers(it once helped me a lot) but to call it a "complete chess mastery course" can be misleading and lead people to stagnation. It maybe motivational, but it states something which the book clearly is not.

Well he actually goes into detail about what he means by imbalance.  He then lists 7 imbalances, defines them, and uses them throughout the book.  There's really no need to guess what he means by imbalance, he's quite explicit.

The question is still who really knows this stuff... i would guess all gms do but maybe its not like that. You know if you watch the master game Karpov against Bouaziz, you find he was losing in a position as black ,from an opening  every master tells you there is no advantage for white.

Also If you see Larry christiansen, you see him win from so tame looking openings sometimes against gms. 

So the question arises is it just blunder, one incidence of bad play, just not their day or are there even under GMs the good , the bad and the ugly.

Its really complicated. Usually you would assume a GM has the ultimative knowledge but do they really have. I mean it could be just laziness but it still could be that even the greatest of the great have lacks of knowledge.

I know GMS deserve highest respect. And i mean becoming GM is like wow and really for me it really deserves praise. But sometimes we have to think about it still.

"Even the world champion doesn´t understand chess in its entirely' -Bronstein, Sorcerer´s Apprentice.

Maybe he could be explicit on what he means by a "complete chess mastery course" too...

i used to like bronstein because he was the underdog but you know his crybaby atitude was kind of annoying. 

I don't know about stronger players, but I don't play according to Silman's imbalances. They are just not natural to me. That's not the way I think about chess. However, they are interesting and may be helpful to others.

I like Silman's books, I have two editions of How to Reassess Your Chess. However, I can't say my play has improved all that much because of them.

well i like his books too, but i only have looked at his endgame book in some more death... I mean he does a very good job of explaining, he doesnt use too much unnecessary material but still you learn as much as with books that do need 10 times as much for the same topic but are still unclear written.

That being said i still think Silman is only good till  a certain leven, that i havent reached yet of course.

I have read HTRYC and The Amateurs Mind. By way of comparison I can only say I once had a friend that was a very good trainer from Leningrad and his english was very strained. He would try to explain things over the board in examples that I had difficulty understanding at the time. When I finally read those two by Silman what I had heard and saw years earlier started making sense. I would be like "oh yeah, of course, that's what he meant and was trying to get through to me". Things became clearer. I've just now bought his endgame book and a few opening ones for the first time in my life. I've thought I would try to make some improvement for a change and Silmans book is an integral part of that. I guess different study materials have different impacts on different people.

I am very much a newb when it comes to the actual study of chess. I have played chess casually for years, but only recently realy started looking at it seriously. I bought Silman's books and I am working through them now. In my opinion, the books are more aimed at showing people how to think than anything else. He is giving new players a framework through which to analyze a situation because actually being able to think critically about the board is the most important skill. I know from experience, as you all should, that new players tend to make moves just because, but Silman tries to build a foundation to organize and priotize moves, pieces and squares. So in that way I think he can be quite helpful to new players. 

As for comparing him to other books to a very large extent that comes down to taste. If you like Petrosian's chess philosophy fine, but one is not neccessarily better than the other. De gustibus non est disputandum.

You've nailed it on the head. It IS a framework to organise your thinking. I wish I had learned that so many years earlier.

hahahhaa. yeah, ill finish what ive got ant go to sleep. dont know how long thatll be. Ive got half a glass of "mud slide". Its mixed with gin and vodka, some rum too, etc