Over the 10 years or so that I have been playing chess in a club setting, I have found that the road to improvement is full of ups and downs, detours, and potholes! There are few quick fixes that will suddenly make your rating improve drastically.
One of the best methods to improve your game is to take time to do regular post-mortems on all of your matches. This can take many forms including: reviewing the game with your opponent, discussing the match with a chess-playing friend, or self-study combined with running the game through a chess engine.
- Glowing Piece
Another helpful step is to put together your own chess library. A good library should include be well rounded and include volumes on openings, middlegames, endings and tactics. I have found that general study of chess strategy and tactics was a good way to get started. Once you have a good grasp of these areas, you can move on to purchasing books on specific openings. After that it can be very helpful to purchase a beginning endgame book so you learn one of the hardest things - “how to win won games”.
That said, the following is a sampling of books that are in my collection.
Winning Chess Openings - Yasser Seirawan
This book is part of the “winning chess” series by Yasser Seirawan. I highly recommend all of the books in the series, but I will say that this volume is one that I come back to again and again. The strength of the book is that it covers just about every major opening that you are likely to come across during your matches and explains the basic principles in great detail. I have experimented with a few ideas from this book and once I found a few that I liked, I purchased specific books that went into more detail on those openings.
Winning Chess Endings - Yasser Seirawan
Similar to Winning Chess Openings, this volume focuses on the basics of endgame play. Common pawn and rook endings are major features as well as an explanation of key nuggets such as the “in the square” rule and the Luciena and Philador positions.
MCO-14 (Modern Chess Openings) - Nick deFirman
A comprehensive volume of all openings and key variations. This book has since been updated with more recent material. Of course, you can also buy many computer programs with the same information - but many times I have found this to be a useful dictionary to look up the decision trees (and counters against) openings and defences that I have not seen before.
Reassess Your Chess Workbook - Jeremy Silman
If you have a hard time seeing your own mistakes, this is the book for you. It contains a number of exercises that are designed to enlighten students about common mistakes and how to overcome them. Silman’s writing style can be somewhat sarcastic, but if you can get past the occasional insult against all of us “patzers”, you can pick up some great tips on strategic planning.
Dvoretsky’s Endgame Manual - Mark Dvoretsky
This one is for serious players who have already read a beginning endgame book. The content is very dense and contains a pleathora of information on a number of endings. I’ve been looking this one over for a few months now and have only gotten to page 35! However, if you are willing to hang in there and plow through the material, it is sure to provide the information needed to turn “losses into draws” and “draws into victories”.
As we celebrate another Halloween we can give a free plug to the coolest book cover that has nothing to do with chess! In a recent Chess Life article they note that the book “Breaking Dawn” is actually the third book in a wildly popular vampire saga. The over 700 page tome doesn’t even allude to strategy or have a single mention of the royal game.
