Improvement
A lot has been written about the road to chess improvement. But the question comes: How much is accurate and how much is written to fill someone’s purse? How many books are necessary?
We’re not likely to be confused with a grandmaster any time soon, but that doesn’t stop us from having an opinion on this.
In the current age of chess database software, even fewer books (and I’m including the db-based ebooks in this as well) than ever before are truly necessary. A beginning player needs a book (or books) which explains the general principles of the opening, the basic tactical maneuvers (pin, fork, etc.) and the basic endgame themes (elementary mates, pawn promotion, etc.) and patience.
The latter quality is hard to find, but essential to develop if it doesn’t exist.
Too many players today waste a lot of time memorizing openings. This results in a player than plays wonderfully, until the book line runs out. Then the player has no idea what to do. It doesn’t matter if the experts believe the line you played gives a huge advantage, if you don’t know how to exploit it.
At the recent SuperNationals in Tennessee, Anatoly Karpov was asked to comment on the state of coaching in the US. He paused, obviously trying to find a way to say it without offending, and said we place far too much emphasis on learning openings. In his opinion, a player shouldn’t bother with lots of opening memorization until they reach a rating of around 1800.
I gulped when I heard that, because I know full well that most of the players I’ve run into couldn’t have made it to 1800 without memorizing lots of offbeat (and even mainstream) lines. But that’s his point. They made it there, and cannot move on, because they don’t really understand what they’re doing.
So, to return to the premise, how many books are necessary? Not many. Which ones? Aye, there’s the rub.
Or is it a rub? Does it really matter whether you learn your middlegame principles from Reuben Fine’s book, or the two volume sets from Romanovsky or Euwe, or Kotov and Keres, or Nimzovich, or Lasker? Or any of the dozens, even hundreds, who have written since? We don’t think which book matters nearly as much as publishers and booksellers would have us believe. It’s more important to your development as a chess player that you study than what. As you go your opponents will show you what you need to work on.
December 8th, 2006 at 11:58 pm
Interesting question: How many books ?
As a 1600 player, I’d say two for the openings. A good ideas book, back in the day Reuben Fine’s “Idea’s Behind the Chess Opening” and an MCO type enclopedia. The first allows one to find what openings feel right, the second allows deeper exploration.
I never read much of the middlegame books, so can’t comment. I tended to use game collections for this, e.g., Alekhine’s and Fischer’s books.
For the endgame, similar to the openings, a short introduction and a more detailed account, in my case, 30 years ago Keres’ and Fine, respectively.
Nowadays a decent chess playing program is useful also. I use ChessGenius ’cause it runs on my Win98 system.
My current opening books are MCO-14 for detail and “Understanding the Chess Openings” by Sam Collins. The latter is not as good as the Fine , but is up to date.
For the endgame, I have only a general introduction, Y. Seirawan’s “Winning Chess Endings”, which I will begin to study this weekend, so I can’t comment on its merits.