For a long time, I've wanted to start a thread about Fred Reinfeld, to examine the question of whether he was a good chess teacher, a bad one, or both. I was thinking of digging out a few of his books to go over things in them, and see what other people thought.

But before I do, I just thought I'd record some impressions I still have of him years later. He'd print interesting games, that illustrated good concepts. But he'd also be overly simplistic, and talk about perfectly playable lines, as though they were no good. Maybe he meant that they weren't good for the beginning player. Which could be true. But when I was first starting to play, people would play those lines, and I would wonder why I couldn't bust them. The reason wasn't that I was playing wrong, it's that the lines were playable.

I think he was also overly concerned with miniatures. He seemed to love games that were over in 20 moves or less. He showed some great examples of how you could get in trouble by neglecting development, or opening lines against your King, or something. But he didn't do that good a job showing how you could create long-term problems for yourself with weak moves.

Like, here's a game I remember from a Reinfeld book, that was supposed to illustrate the problems of both neglected development and weakening moves.

1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bc4 f6?

At this point he commented about how f6 was a weak move. It lengthened the diagonal of White's bishop, which made Black's King less secure, and denied the f6 square to Black's knight. Okay, continue:

4. Nh4 g5??? 5. Qh5+ Ke7 6. Nf5++

This game is a good example of how weak moves can get you blown off the board. The beginner will have an easy time understanding why 4... g5 was a weak move, but we really haven't illustrated the problems of 3...f6, or how White might take advantage of a move like that if Black doesn't follow it up with an even worse one.

I'm thinking of trying to find a few Reinfeld books, and look for examples of things he did wrong and things he did right. I'm thinking that in the end he has to be considered a good teacher, because he got a lot of people interested in chess, and gave them a good starting point of knowledge. But he also taught people a few things that they had to unlearn later, I think.

I remember reading that Reinfeld wrote a few good chess books that sold like lead balloons. Then he cranked out a crappy book that sold like hotcakes. After that he wrote few good books.

One of my first books was one of his good ones. I don't remember the title now, but it had a game of Nimzowitsch's that was quite eye-opening. I still have the book and it's pretty good.

Reinfeld wrote during the Great Depression and then after the war. He did a lot to build up American chess for Fischer and his generation. He, Horowitz, Chernev and others did a lot for chess and no one remembers them.

I believe Reinfeld co-wrote a book with Fine on the second Alekhine-Bogoljubov match. It was decent, though very small.

I turned up a copy of a Reinfeld book called Improving Your Chess, which is fairly typical of his instructional books. I think I've got a few others in the garage, but this one should do for starters.

The blurb on back is interesting. It's from something called The Chess Courier, which I've never heard of. Get this:



There's more, but this is the notable part. The elipses indicate that text has been omitted, and we don't know what it was. But they've pieced together sentence fragments to create a sentence that was not there in the original. We can only help that they've retained the original meaning. Because you could do the same to change "This book is definitely NOT the kind of thing anyone should read" to "This book is definitely ... the kind of thing anyone should read".

Here are a couple of examples of how Reinfeld's comments on openings threw me off when I was starting out. From Page 48



There's an accompanying diagram, which reinforces this:



Granted, no actual question marks have been attached to any of Black's moves. But a beginner reading all this is going to assume that Black has gone badly wrong, and think that he, the beginner, should be nearing victory already. He'd certainly never dream that Black has played a perfectly playable book line.

I seem to remember a lot of things like this in Reinfeld. He'd criticize early moves, when in fact the game was decided by blunders later on. I think that he probably felt that the Rubinstein French wasn't a good line for the beginner, and so said these things to keep the beginner from wanting to play it. The problem is that the beginner felt that he ought to be winning if somebody else played it, but this wasn't the case.

In this game, what really gets Black in trouble is not the fact that he played the Rubinstein, it's a blunder he made on Move 9 (which Fred DOES give a question mark to).

Remainder of the game, without notes.

4...Nd7 5. Nf3 Ngf6 6. Bd3 Be7 7. O-O Nxe4 8. Bxe4 Nf6 9. Bd3 b6? 10. Ne5! O-O 11. Nc6 Qd6 12. Qf3! Bd7 13. Nxe7+ Qxe7 14. Bg5 Rac8 15. Rfe1 Rfe8 16. Qh3! Qd6 17. Bxf6 gxf6 18. Qh6! f5 19. Re3 Qxd4 20. c3! 1-0

There are more notes to the game, but he never tries to explain why Black didn't play 10. ...Bb7 after having played 9...b6. Almost all Black's problems come from the Kingside attack White gets after exchanging off Black's KB in that odd way.


What we have here is the same thing we saw in the other game. Fred criticizes an early move, but doesn't really show the problems with the early move, because the real mistakes come later.

Here's an eye-opener, from page 55:



Yowza! This is a major line, that top players play frequently with Black, and he's practically consigned it to the ashcan. What he's said isn't exactly wrong, White does have a better center and greater mobility, but he hasn't even hinted at the existence of compensation for Black. And his use of the word "overwhelming" clearly implies that this line isn't worth playing for Black.

You've heard of the DaVinci Code. With Fred, we have the Reinfeld Code. The Reinfeld Code is that when he says a line isn't good, he means only that it isn't good for YOU, the beginner. He doesn't mean that it's objectively bad. He's right, I wouldn't advise a beginner to play lines like this either. But the way he says it is very misleading.

Here's another example, from page 60, which is interesting in light of the previous one.

He's just finished discussing the Center Game, and how when White's Queen captures on d4, it gets kicked away with loss of time.



Now, wait a minute. The position here is extremly similar to the previous one in which he thought White was about to gain overwhelming mobility. The only diference is that we exchanged off Black's e pawn instead of his c pawn with our d4/Nxd4 maneuver.




This must be very confusing for the beginner. In the Sicilian Defense example we saw earlier, Black can play that exact same move, Nf6, attacking White's e pawn. But in that case, Fred's eval is totally different, with very little explanation of why this is so. Why is the one position great for White, and such a similar position not great?

It's true that the move Bc5 that Fred mentions is something that Black can play in the Scotch Game that he can't immediately play in the Sicilian line. But Fred says that the move gains time by threatening to win White's Knight. However, if White plays Be3, he's responding with a developing move of his own, making it not at all obvious how White is losing time here. None of this is very well explained.

One of my first chess books was Reinfeld's 1001 Ways to Checkmate. I found it quite useful...I was a rank beginnger then. So later, in the library, I found a general opening book by Reinfeld and took it home to study. I did find it very useful, not confusing, and I began winning games against my nemesis (a neighborhood kid who would always beat me, often with the Scholar's Mate or some variation).

So from that perspective, I would say Reinfeld is a good teacher for someone who maybe knows how the pieces move and not much more. I did learn a lot, started winning games. Only years later did I realize how many exceptions there are to his advice, and that people with more knowledge would get less from it.

Another example, people were praising Silman's book and how it helped them. I read it, found it wrong in some places, misleading in others, over generalized, and the parts he had right were recycled Nimzowitsch. Of course, if I had read his book before My System and other books, I too would have found Silman's book extremely helpful.

Later I read John Watson's book on freedom from strict rules in chess, which I also found enlightening...but if I had read it before Nimzowitsch (or Silman) I would have thought it to be a rather useless and perhaps even silly book. Why's he talking about breaking rules that I didn't know were rules in the first place?

So, perhaps "good teacher" should be in reference to a certain category of player that is being taught rather than good teacher, yes or no????????? Just initial thoughts...I'll have to find an old book of his and look at it too though.

I remember he had one called The Complete Book of Chess Openings. A very small volume, making the title laughable. But it was a good book for a beginner to get a little taste of all the major openings, and a little of their flavor. But he never tells you how many exceptions there are to his rules. Sometimes there aren't exceptions. I wish he warned you a little better of how you might have to unlearn some of his lessons when you progress.

Here's a Reinfeld example that I think is pretty good. From the same book:



I might have wanted to go a little farther with this. Maybe talk about why White failed to castle. The position is closed in the center, and in such positions, a player might delay castling, as long as he can keep the lines closed (which he didn't do here), or shuffle pieces a bit more. Time is a less important factor in closed positions. In fact, I remember once hearing Kim Commons commenting on a Karpov-Korchnoi game by quoting Pillsbury's rule: Don't castle because you can, only castle because you want to. (He was trying to explain why Korchnoi was castling so late).

I can sort of see the point of Be2, trying to find a new home for the Bishop, which was doing nothing on its old diagonal. White thought h3 was a good idea because he was trying to prevent Bg4, of course. Also maybe discuss the move d5 a little more. In some positions of this sort, White plays it, in others he doesn't. But on the whole, what's here is good. Especially since it's aimed at rank beginners that you don't want to bury in too much detail. The game certainly does what it's supposed to do: shows you how neglected development and an uncastled King can bite you.

Even Reinfeld's interest in miniatures is not entirely a bad thing. A lot of people learning chess think of it as a very long, slow game (like Monopoly). They'd better learn pretty quickly that they can get blown off the board in minutes if they don't know what they're doing.

Reinfeld had another book called How to Win Chess Games Quickly, which was fairly decent. It was a collection of miniatures, which he tried to categorize into chapters, by the way that they were lost (too many Queen moves, neglected development, et cetera).


So, if you were going to recommend a book, to an absolute beginner, what book would you recommend? Silman's book? Or Reinfeld? Or something else?

Alternately, I'm thinking of getting myself a beginner book and reading it through. Tal used to sometimes watch beginner's lessons on TV, to make sure he didn't lose touch with the fundamentals, and that sounds like a good idea. If I wanted to get a beginner book for myself to read, even though I'm way beyond that stage, what would be a good one? In fact, forget about just one. What are the best beginner books on the market today? I haven't read any in several years.

Here's an interesting one:



I cut him some slack here, since Hedgehog formations weren't as popular in 1955, until Suttles popularized them. But Reinfeld definitely overstates his case here. 1...g6 is a playable move, as both Pirc and Robatsch were showing at that time. It's not a good opening for a beginner, granted, but according to Fred, "any" expert player would call this a win for White. Fritz evals it at +0.82, which is clearly better, yes, but far from dead won.

And of course, he said that what happens to Black is "well illustrated" by this example, when in fact, it ceases with his verbal explanation of why the seup is bad. We never actually got to see the punishment over the board.

In overstating his case, Fred probably succeeded at the task of dissuading his readers from playing these openings, at the cost of making them overconfident when they had to meet them.

I think it must have been the complete book of chess openings that I used because I remember there were different openings. And I agree, he perhaps should have warned the beginner he or she would need to unlearn many things.



That's a question probably worthy of a thread by itself. Didn't we once have a thread on best chess books for beginners???

I'd say Silman over Reinfeld for sure. I hear Silman has updated (rewritten) his Amateur book (even he says "what was I thinking?") in some of those chapters, and he's checked analysis using engines and, I presume, turned on his spell-checker.

But for a complete beginner, Silman might me too advanced. So maybe Chess Fundamentals (Capablanca). I also liked Game of Chess by Tarrasch, not one everyone would agree with as Tarrasch has definite ideas on how one should learn chess (do not play any games at all while studying the book, not till I say you can, no matter how great the temptation).

There really weren't that many good learning books when I first learned chess so I ended up with the old masters (Euwe, Nimzowitsch). I'm sure there are more modern beginner books (Basic Chess Openings, Kallai for e.g.??).


Tal had the right idea, and anyone teaching chess should do something similar. I read a first year biology textbook every 2 years (I receive new editions of textbooks in exchange for marking biology collections for a prof at the university--that way he doesn't have to dip into his budget and the textbooks publishers send him to review don't clutter his bookshelves).

Perhaps you could start with Capablanca's Fundamentals? Keep in touch with both the basics and the history of chess at once.

Maybe. I probably didn't pay much attention because I didn't know any beginners to show it too. But this time I'm perfectly prepared to read it myself until some beginners show up.

Actually, I'd like to dig out Reinfeld's How to Win Chess Games Quickly book, and go through it again. I'm thinking that too much blitz chess has made my opening play a little too sloppy. I'd like to go through a whole book full of quick kills, just to get it fresher in mind about what kind of moves can get you in fast trouble. I'm sure I have it in a tub in the garage. Fortunately, I cataloged all my book tubs a few years ago, so hopefully it's listed.

Another beginner's book I remember, but don't remember the title. Some kind of book out of the UK that told you how the pieces moved, and had little imaginative storylets to illustrate it. I don't know how far it went into strategy, but it was very nice for somebody who knew nothing at all about the game. I read it in school years ago, and found a copy of it in a bookstore years later. I'm sure I have it in storage, but won't remember the title until I see it again.

Reinfeld had a book called The Complete Chess Course, which I think was a collection of a lot of his other books, rolled into one. I just don't know which ones. The person I learned the moves from had a Reinfeld book called Chess in a Nutshell. I don't remember how old I was then, but considering that we riffed on the title, and called it things like Chess For Nutcases, and things like that, and actually thought they were funny, I hope I wasn't older than 10.