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ReviewsLearn from your Chess MistakesReviewed by S. Evan Kreider 11/17/02 Learn from your Chess Mistakes, by IM Chris Baker (Batsford, 2002). 144 pp. Okay, I admit it: sometimes, chess books bore me. After all, there are only so many dry instructional texts I can read before all those positions and techniques I'm supposed to memorize make my eyes glaze over. At those times, I find myself looking for something a little more interesting and entertaining, while still instructive enough to be worth the time and money. It is just this sort of book which Chris Baker has attempted to write with Learn from your Chess Mistakes. Unfortunately, it's only a partial success. According to the back cover: "This original work -- designed specifically for club players -- identifies typical failings, such as poor opening preparation . . . losing the thread of the position, miscalculation, lack of confidence . . . time trouble, missed opportunities, [etc.]. This book helps the reader identify and analyse these mistakes in order to avoid them next time round. Players . . . will take heart and benefit from this upbeat book, written in the author's informal style with a gentle sense of humor." This description is more or less accurate; however, I'd say that "original" is a bit too strong a description for some parts of the book, and I also have some issues with the author's "informal" writing style. The book is divided into three main parts ("Part 1: Openings," "Part 2: Middlegames," "Part 3: Endgames"), prefaced by a one-page introduction and followed by a ten-problem quiz with solutions and a rating scale. The intro and quiz are standard fare, so I will focus my review on each of the three main parts. "Part 1: Openings" includes: "Poor opening preparation," "Being over-prepared and getting 'stale'," "Being caught by opponent's preparation," "Choice of openings / learning new lines and styles," "Understanding standard and re-occurring themes," and "Being caught by move orders and transpositions." To be honest, I wasn't terribly impressed with this part of the book. Conventional Wisdom says that club players shouldn't spend too much time on openings. Be that as it may, club players LOVE their openings, Conventional Wisdom or not. So on the one hand, Baker is probably just giving the people what they want; on the other hand, I fear he may be reinforcing the tendency of the club player to spend too much time on openings. Worse, I didn't feel that there was much "original" in this section. It pretty much boils down to the standard opening advice with which most club players are probably already familiar. After all, who hasn't heard that it's important to understand the typical themes, strategies, and plans of one's chosen opening, or that blitz games are a good way to learn new opening lines? Even if someone hadn't heard this advice before, it's the sort of thing one could hear just by hanging out at chess discussion forums and talking with other amateurs -- there's certainly no need to buy a book written by an IM. "Part 2: Middlegames" includes: "Losing the 'thread' of the position," "Miscalculation," "Confidence and playing against weaker / stronger opposition," " Middlegame judgment," "Losing the initiative," and "Missing your shot." I'm happy to report that my opinion of this part of the book is MUCH more positive. As Baker points out, the tendency of most club players is to chalk up each loss to a missed tactic or a momentary lapse of concentration; however, there are usually subtler positional and / or psychological causes (such as the ones listed in the contents above) which lead up to the final overt error. These sorts of things are extremely difficult to identify, much less correct, but Baker gives an excellent demonstration via several well-annotated games. "Part 3: Endgames" includes: "Endgame technique," "Forming a plan," "Having too many choices and missing tricks," "Understanding 'good and bad pieces'," and "Control." My opinion of this section is somewhere between those of the first two parts of the book. Some of it is old hat (how many more books do I need to buy which include Lucena's position?!), but some of it is more revealing. I especially like the section on good and bad pieces in the endgame. Most instruction on good and bad pieces focuses on bishops and knights in the middlegame, but Baker spends about 14 pages showing us not only how the various pieces can be good or bad in the endgame, but also how they can change from good to bad (or vice versa) during the course of the endgame. After reading this section, I feel that I have a better understanding of how to evaluate endgame positions (and I sure hope that will translate to playing them better . . . ). There's one problem that I had with the book as a whole, and I'd be remiss in my duties as a reviewer if I didn't mention it: Baker continuously uses unnecessary quotation marks around any word or phrase which could by any stretch of the imagination be construed as colloquial or figurative. The result is that the book is littered with quotation marks. Actually, "littered" is too mild -- the book is downright filthy with them. I haven't done a rigorous statistical analysis, but I'd be willing to bet that there are at least a few dozen unnecessary quotation marks every 5 to 10 pages. Let me show you an example [exterior quotation marks mine]: "In retrospect I put this down to a state of 'going through the motions', that is to say whenever my opponent played the French, I would wheel out my pet line and only when he varied from my 'book' did I start to think. Actually, it was worse than that, even when my opponents played something new I didn't really stop to think -- this is playing 'stale' chess at its worst. To combat this it was necessary to play something new and to rethink some of my ideas and strategies in my 'pet' line . . . " Not a single one of the above quotation marks is necessary. True, all those words and phrases are in some sense figurative, but they're so common that they hardly need attention drawn to them. Worse, the use of quotation marks is inconsistent: "pet" gets quotation marks one time but not another, and "wheel" is just as metaphorical as anything else there but doesn't get quotation marks. Even worse, he often uses them around words that could barely be said to be colloquial or figurative at all; for example: "9 Nb3 is the 'safe' move." " . . . to counter an 'unusual' 6th move by Black in a main line of a 'normal' opening . . . " " . . . up to date 'test games' should be used as your 'reference' . . . " That last one is my favorite: are they not really 'test games'?! Do you 'reference' them figuratively?! I know this sounds like a nit-picky criticism, but it really detracted from my enjoyment of the book. I found it kind of amusing the first several dozen times, but after that I just found it 'unnecessary' and 'distracting' . . . So, should you buy this book? That's a tough call. There's certainly some useful instruction in here, but I'm not sure if there's enough to justify the £14.99 (about US $22 or so?) price, especially since the book is only 144 pages long, and only about half of it really impressed me. In addition, the production value is less than perfect: the paper has a rough feel to it, and the fonts and diagrams have an outdated look to them. If you're in the mood to buy a new chess book just for the heck of it, then go for. Or better yet: Christmas is coming -- get someone else to buy it for you! Otherwise, you might think about shopping around.
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