I doubt I could have done much with "My System" as my second book.
I didn't get to Nimzovich until I had played a couple years of tournaments. That was a good time to look at it. But even so I didn't quite understand his urgency, because I had already absorbed some of his ideas indirectly.
If Mal is dissatisfied with chess literature today, he should have seen it in the sixties and seventies. There wasn't much available. A bunch of primers like the Reinfeld books, some opening books but nothing like today, Fine's "Basic Chess Endings," some technical books like Euwe's "The Middle Game" volumes, plus game collections.
I'm currently reading through Seirawan's Winning Chess Strategies to work on my middlegame strategic understanding as I continue to put in huge hours on tactics, endgames, and opening theoretical understanding. I also have My System and Chess Praxis sitting on the shelf next to me - The new figurine notation editions. Cool stuff. Anyway, I'm actually considering just skimming the rest of the Seirawan points and jumping over to REALLY diving into My System as it's a) the positional bible of chess and b) I actually understand Nimzowitsch's material naturally. The concepts in My System and the way he writes, just really saturate my mind easily.
Yes though, these are relatively complex understandings for a ~1400 with no real OTB experience. That said, my strong suit does seem to be my endgames and positional understanding while my weak suit *was* tactics. There is no question that my starting tactical training at 30+ years old initially made it very, very difficult. I saw nothing. I was stuck around 1100 on CT for thousands of problems at one point. After just months of intensely studying each problem, reading the comments and exploring the different variations, I finally started making progress again and now my estimated FIDE is over 1625 on standard and 1530 on blitz. At this point, my positional understanding and newfound tactical prowess are really starting to gel together.
I would say that I'm playing at around a true ~1500 FIDE at this point, probably take a hundred points or so. I have a league 45/45 game tomorrow night and I've been playing 30+30's and 45+45's against ~1500 elo computers on LucasChess and winning consistently. Friends that I play 3+2 blitz with OTB on a weekly basis basically never, ever win anymore. I used to lose 50%.
I doubt I could have done much with "My System" as my second book.
I didn't get to Nimzovich until I had played a couple years of tournaments. That was a good time to look at it. But even so I didn't quite understand his urgency, because I had already absorbed some of his ideas indirectly.
If Mal is dissatisfied with chess literature today, he should have seen it in the sixties and seventies. There wasn't much available. A bunch of primers like the Reinfeld books, some opening books but nothing like today, Fine's "Basic Chess Endings," some technical books like Euwe's "The Middle Game" volumes, plus game collections.