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Reviews

Improvement Books

Reviewed by Peter Connor

7/28/02

Understanding Chess Move By Move, by John Nunn (Gambit 2001), 239 pp.
Improve Your Chess Now, by Jonathan Tisdall (Everyman Chess, 1999), 221 pp.
How to Become A Deadly Chess Tactician, by David LeMoir (Gambit, 2002), 238 pp.
Rapid Chess Improvement, by Michael de la Maza (Everyman Chess, 2002), 126 pp.

The chess world used to be a simple and orderly place. We would improve, we were told, if we studied the classic openings and games of the great masters, learned basic chess endings from Reuben Fine, revered My System by Nimzowitsch, avoid nasty anti-positional openings like the Pelikan, and learned to think like a grandmaster as taught by Commissar Kotov. Then reality started to set in. Kotov’s Grandmaster Thinking scheme, requiring one to select all the candidate moves in a given position, then analyze each in turn without backtracking until a logical conclusion is reached, had all the coherence of a 5-year Plan under Stalin, and collapsed in pretty much the same way.

First, what is a candidate move? (The analogous question under a 5-year Plan, "What will be the demand for a certain brand of shoes in 5 years?" turned out to be unanswerable.) If my scholastic players could identify reasonable candidate moves reliably, their ratings would immediately increase 500 points. Indeed, the very selection of candidate moves seems to be the result of the thinking process, not the precursor. Second, as psychological research has confirmed, Grandmasters don’t think this way; they continually revisit lines in an attempt to improve them with information gained by analyzing other moves. Third, with chess tournaments speeding up (a development which I think was inevitable in the modern world), an encyclopedic thinking process has some serious downsides - like losing on time. Finally, the modern approach to the opening is strictly pragmatic; Kramnik and even Kasparov have played the Pelikan with success.

The bottom-line for players seeking self-improvement or a piece of those big class prizes has been the need for better preparation. But what to prepare - openings, endings, middlegame, strategy, tactics, positional play, thinking procedures? Books on all of these topics have flooded the market in the last 10 years, many of them quality productions like the four works being reviewed here. These four works constitute an improved approach to studying chess that’s a welcome advance over the methods mentioned above.

Understanding Chess Move By Move (Gambit) exemplifies the traditional method of self-improvement through the careful study of the games of the great masters, with the sagacious Dr. Nunn as interlocutor performing in his usual excellent manner. Nunn’s book is reminiscent of the Chernev classic Logical Chess Move By Move, but is much deeper & more thorough, being written for somewhat more advanced players. Through 30 games in a wide variety of openings, every significant move is explained, and many important alternatives are discussed. Each game is identified by a theme (though in reality, no game is quite so mono-thematic), all the key ideas & plans are thoroughly explained and discussed, and finally, there’s a game summary. If we occasionally wish that the discussions had gone further, we must remember that there are limitations on the length of a popular work. Understanding Chess Move By Move is beautifully put together, and in my opinion, anyone who plays over the games in it slowly and carefully is bound to improve his understanding of chess. In effect, it is a very inexpensive chess lesson from a top GM. If you are a class player seeking rapid improvement, of course, you will probably focus on the games involving openings you frequently play or play against. It’s hard to find anything about this book not to like and it was almost certainly the best chess book of 2001, and one of the very best of the past decade or so.

Improve Your Chess Now (Everyman) by GM Tisdall, is an interesting combination of chess and psychology. In Lasker-like fashion, we are taught how to play a bad position by throwing up obstacles, how to train at pattern recognition, how to visualize the moves of a combination; in other words, how to approach chess as a struggle, from the perspective of a GM. There is also a good deal of tactical material that is interesting and worthwhile. Many chess books promise a new approach to improving one’s chess, but this one actually delivers. Tisdall focuses on the thinking behind the moves and offers a much more realistic and useful method for analyzing a position and choosing a move than that put forth by Kotov. Tisdall provides a number of very helpful & instructive exercises throughout the book, which force the reader to dig in and work, but they are very effective and instructive. I enjoyed the book, but I think the material is probably too abstract and difficult for lower level class players. For the serious player who’s reached the Class B level or above and is willing to work, this book is a good investment.

How To Become a Deadly Chess Tactician (Gambit) was obviously written as a labor of love by David LeMoir and is just chockfull of great tactical material. I absolutely loved the book. LeMoir classifies sacrifices by historical era and by type; for example, if you didn’t know what a “silent” sacrifice was before you began, you’ll be an expert when you finish this book. He also includes many outstanding games and examples of imaginative tactics and sacrifices. LeMoir’s approach is a break from the traditional tactics manual. He focuses more on attitude and imagination than most other books, with plenty of emphasis on the mind-set a player needs to become a deadly tactician. He also creates an entirely different way of categorizing tactical and attacking themes, challenging the reader to think about tactics in a different way and making his ideas memorable. There’s still plenty of advice about how to calculate and recognize patterns, and he doesn’t invent any new tactical themes of course, but his approach to explaining, categorizing, and reinforcing the tactical ideas is unique enough to make them easy to recall and apply when those themes arise in your own games. The material is by no means simple, but if you make a serious attempt to come to grips with it, your chess imagination and tactical vision will expand significantly. [You may also want to check out Lemoir's related book How to Be Lucky in Chess, which discusses the practical benefits of speculative sacrifices. - Webmaster]

In Rapid Chess Improvement (Everyman), Michael de la Maza (a former D player who recently won a $10,000 class prize) has a strikingly simple message for class level chess players who want to improve: tactics, tactics, tactics. He believes that players below the expert level are wasting their time studying opening theory and positional chess generally, and should focus intensively on board vision, tactical knowledge, and a highly disciplined move selection process. By doing so himself, de la Maza apparently progressed from D player to low Expert in about 2 years, an impressive achievement. In Rapid Chess Improvement, he lays out a strategy and exercise schedule to accomplish the same sort of improvement for any class player (or at least any class player with the drive to devote hundreds of hours to the program). This makes Rapid Chess Improvement a fairly unique book; it doesn’t teach chess, it teaches a training and playing method, focused almost 100% on tactics. While most tournament players agree that tactics are the most important part of the game, de la Maza overstates the case in order to make it convincing. As some of his own games show, he is far from ignorant of the opening or endgame. Still, the focus on lengthy and repeated tactical drilling to improve pattern recognition is highly intriguing and may well provide the biggest bang for the time invested. If you are disciplined and serious about improving your chess, and can make a real time commitment, give it a shot.