Classic Chess books

Originally posted by greenpawn34
Logical Chess as mentioned.

Most Instructive games Ever Played - Chernev.

Avro book will go over your head. leave it for now.

Capa's Chess Fundementals is a classic,

My Chess Career needs to be read After 'Fundementals'
(but don't go out of you way to get it).

Top two are two of the Best Chess Books ever written.
Chernev could write and what's more he loved writing about chess.

I'm somewhat ashamed that after all of the threads you've entered on chess books, and even
classical chess learning, you have not added this book in any snippet. It really is quite a book,
and creates a new facet of chess understanding (at least it did for me).

Lyev Polugaevsky - Grandmaster Preperation


-GIN

Originally posted by Nowakowski
Lyev Polugaevsky - Grandmaster Preparation[/b]

That title sounds interesting. Has it been translated to English (Polugaevsky is Russian, right?), and is it about opening preparation or the preparing of the whole "chess mindset"?

edit: Oh it appears to be about the birth and development of the Polugaevsky variation of the Sicilian defense.

Originally posted by heinzkat
That title sounds interesting. Has it been translated to English (Polugaevsky is Russian, right?), and is it about opening preparation or the preparing of the whole "chess mindset"?

edit: Oh it appears to be about the birth and development of the Polugaevsky variation of the Sicilian defense.

its deeper then that.
He shows you how he analyzes positions,
He shows how you can correctly create variants, at the board, or in postgame analysis.

He prepares you to begin thinking, like a weapon, instead of a conductor.

-GIN

Originally posted by heinzkat
That title sounds interesting. Has it been translated to English (Polugaevsky is Russian, right?), and is it about opening preparation or the preparing of the whole "chess mindset"?

edit: Oh it appears to be about the birth and development of the Polugaevsky variation of the Sicilian defense.

This is a review of the book, which can be found from Bryan Embrey on Amazon.com.


GM Lev Polugaevsky, twice a candidate for the world title in the 1970s, was considered
perhaps the world's authority on a variation of the Sicilian called, not surprisingly, the
Polugaevsky Variation. This book is literally a personal history on how the author developed
and refined this variation. Originally published in 1977 and translated from the original
Russian by Ken Neat, the Russian title should actually be translated as "Birth of a Variation"
(Rozhdeniye Varianta). Exhaustively showing the reader how he researched the variation,
Polugaevsky also treats the reader to how a hard-working Soviet chessplayer in the 1950s and
60s practiced his craft and how many other chessplayers contributed to the Variation by
playing against Polugaevsky as he tried out various move trees. While it may seem extremely
dry on casual reading, it becomes fascinating and absorbing if you take the time to follow
the author as he navigates the Sicilian Defense, one of the more complex openings in chess.
However, this is not the whole of the book. In other sections, Polugaevsky treats the reader
to researches he did during adjourned games (a practice no longer acceptable since the advent
of computers) as well as how he prepared to play many leading GMs and World Champions
during his career.

In his introduction, GM Mikhail Tal wrote: "The book which you, dear reader, are about to
open is rather different from a biography. It is not a ceremonial speech by a grandmaster, but
an invitation to enter into the private study of one of strongest players in the world... In his
material on this variation, the author does not give us the information that in such-and-such a
game such-and-such was played, but instead creates something of a monograph-cum-
biography. In it there is no mention of results in tournaments, but of searchings and
disappointments, and of the paths to this or that idea."

It is unfortunate that the book is out-of-print. It is as original as Reti's "Modern Ideas in
Chess", Nimzovich's "My System", and Vukovich's "Art of Attack". Not necessarily suitable for
beginning players, dedicated intermediates (above say 1500) can get a lot out of it (I should
know: I'm barely above 1500 myself). Polugaevsky also wrote "Grandmaster Performance",
a collection of 64 of his best tournament games as well as a rigorous series of books on the
Sicilian Defense itself.