Hi, I'm fairly new to chess. I've known how to play for a long time now but I just started taking it seriously. I was wondering if anyone could recommend a good chess book for me to start with and maybe some books that would be better for me down the line. I'm 19 and I understand the basics. Basically, I'm just looking for a way to get an edge on my friends and become a decent chess player. All book ideas are very much appreciated. Thanks.
Focus on tactics for the fastest results. Winning Chess Tactics by Seirawan is a great primer on tactics, and a little book by Murray Chandler entitled How To Beat Your Dad At Chess has alot of themes well worth remembering. Then use puzzle books and go over the puzzles with 1 to 4 move solutions repeatedly until you can solve them very quickly. You can do all this in just 2-3 months if you work at it, and the books mentioned in the post above by CalWriter will be of far greater value after you have your tactics down. If you want some free stuff, go to chesscafe.com and read the Novice Nook articles by Dan Heisman. All of the articles are archived on the site, so you will have plenty of reading.
good luck,
BLR
EDIT- I would add Logical Chess Move By Move by Chernev to Cal's excellent list for it's easy to follow explanations of how masters think through games. You want basic stuff that will impact your game quickly, it's there.
To get an edge on u're opponent u should study tactics. tactics can get u up till 1700 easily... the best was to study tactics is to go over puzzles several times so by repetion, the patterns stick into u're head. if u want more detail about that then mssg me...
for books... winning chess tactics,play winning chess, winning chess strategys all by yasser seirwan. he has 6 of them. u should read that...logical chess move by move is good...simple chess is good also... reasses your chess and my system won't be much use to u at this points. there more for players around 1700 and up....
Tactics are necessary, I agree. You still should get a good grounding on strategy with the Silman books, for example, which are excellent. Study everything! You can't go wrong. Playing lots of games helps too and going over your losses. If you play a game on RHP and you lost and you're not sure why, it's a good idea to message your opponent and ask him or her where you went wrong.
Originally posted by SamdoggThe Complete Book Of Chess Strategy: Grandmaster Techniques From A-Z by Jeremy Silman (This may be the one that you are thinking of). An excellent book to get you a basic foundation in all the fundamental aspects, openings, middlegame strategy and tactics, as well as basic endgame ideas. Other books that are cut from the same mold are Chess For Dummies and The Simon & Schuster Pocket Guide To Chess.
I'm not sure but I think it's called The complete book of openings by Jerey Silman
Originally posted by lucifershammerThis is a great book, but you can get overwhelmed by it. I use this as a reference, if I blow an endgame, I will go here and look it up, then play the board over using Dvoretsky's ideas and (hopefully) improve.
Since no one has mentioned end game books - Dvoretsky's Endgame Manual. Covers a vast area, but you can get by reading just the black portions.
If you're starting from zero, I'd start with one of the begginner books. Both chess books from the "Dummies" and "The Complete Idiot's Guide" series are good, as is Sierawan's "Play Winning Chess". I'd follow that by a book that explains tactical themes like Sierawan's "Winning Chess Tactics". There are other good books of this type I'm told, but this is the one I'm familiar with and it's excellent. Re-read it every once in a while for a couple of years, especially if you've taken a break from chess. Once you know the themes I'd start with a program of tactical puzzles. There are lots of ways you could go here. I'm currently going through John Emms' "The Ultimate Chess Puzzle Book", which fits the bill nicely. CT-Art is highly recomended if you prefer software for this. In any case, this should be your focus for quite some time and the approach you take is important. Your goal is to be able to recognise tactics in your own games. The current wisdom is to develop pattern recognition through repetition. Thus, to get the most out of a book of chess problems, you should go back through it several times until you can solve nearly all the problems almost instantly. This sounds wrong to a lot of people, I think because they look at chess puzzles as a way to test their ability to solve a puzzle they haven't seen before. The only test that matters is whether you can win games and the best way to do this is to learn to rapidly spot opportunities. I highly recomend you read Dan Heisman's archived "Novice Nook" article on ChessCafe.com entitled "An Improvement Plan" where he suggests a similar approach.
Of course there are a lot of other great books you can read along the way. You should pick up a good endgame book at some point, and you don't want to completely neglect the opening. Many other excellent books have been suggested here as well. But IMHO, learning tactical recognition should form the bones your study plan until you become quite a strong player.
The basic theme here is TACTICS TACTICS TACTICS.
Yes, get a puzzle book. My favorites are The Ultimate Chess Puzzle Book by John Emms (mentioned in one of the posts above) because it has so many problems (1000), they are sorted by difficulty, and they are checked for accuracy by a computer (puzzle books with errors in the solution can confuse you, or annoy you), and 303 Tricky Chess Tactics by Wilson and Alberston because it is small (so you can take it anywhere), and it is sorted by theme, then incresing in difficulty within the theme. These are just my personal favorites. There are many, and alot of people like Chess by Polgar. This is a huge book, over 5000 puzzles. You won't get more for your money anywhere.
BLR