What are some good chess books for the intermediate player?
Tuesday, January 12th, 2010 at
6:44 pm
I play on ICC (the Internet Chess Club). My rating is about 1300 but a Grandmaster said it was 1500. I lost to a player rated over 3000 in 52 moves.
These questions are never easy to answer…just knowing your rating from a web site doesn’t tell me much about your strenghts or weaknesses. And ratings obtained on internet sites do not always (in fact, seldom) translate accurately to over the board play.
Having said that, here are, in my opinion, a few books that really should be in every player’s library:
Jeremy Silman’s "How to Reassess Your Chess" and "The Amateur’s Mind" are excellent.
"Logical Chess, Move By MOve" by Irving Chernev.
Yasser Seirawan’s "Winning Chess" series is excellent. I would recommend studying them in the following order:
1) Play Winning Chess (you can actually skip this one, because much of it deals with rules of the game, but it also contains some annotations by Seirawan himself on a couple of his games).
2) Winning Chess Endings
3) Winning Chess Tactics
4) Winning Chess Strategies
5) Winning Chess Combinations
6) Winning Chess Brilliancies
7) Winning Chess Openings
Susan Polgar’s "Chess Tactics for Champions" is excellent. So is "Learn Chess Tactics" by John Nunn.
Tactics should be the focal point of your study at this point. Don’t worry about "learning" openings yet… just play good opening principles, and you’ll be fine against most players at your level.
You might also check out some Bruce Pandolfini books:
1) The ABC’s of Chess
2) Weapons of Chess
3) Chessercizes (I believe he has several books out in this series…they’re basically problem solving books)
4) Pandolfini’s Endgame Course
These few books will give you a good foundation. You can also check out Nimzo’s "My System" and "Chess Praxis", but if the material in these two books seems to be over your head, go back to them later on.
I’d also recommend Ron Curry’s "Win at Chess" as an excellent one-volume book covering tactics, strategy and openings.
Best of luck to you!
I got a really good ones at Barnes & Noble. Check it out.
Bobby Fishers chess book.
Winning Chess Series isnt really good for a player of 1500 if you have your basics down pat. Neither is the Bobby fisher book.
Fred Reinfeld’s "1001 Chess Tactics and Combinations"
A page a day keeps your tactics strong. It lasts months. Trust me I know.
I found "How to become a Deadly Chess Tactician" by Lemoir, very good. It gives creative Ideas you may not have thought of before. Multiple piece sacrifing, en prise, etc. Many historical example.
Tal – Botvinnik 1960
Brillantly written.
Kasparov’s My Great Predecessors Series
Comprehensive. Very Comprehesive, Different Playing Styles from Tal and Fisher to Petrosian.
Branch out into endgames. John Nunn is a good writer, there are many good endgame books but that is one of the weakest points players of our caliber have.
Personally I am a tactics player so I play tactical openings:
Danish Gambit by Lutes
Kings Gambit as White by Raingruber and Masers