They're trying to copy the Dummies series, but I find the title a little off-putting too.

Thumbing through the Patrick Wolff book, I found a couple of errors. Minor typos, to be sure, like listing +10-4=5 instead of +10-5=4 as the score of Lasker-Steinitz I. But I get nervous when I find any mistakes at all in 5 minutes of thumbing through a book. I was curious to see who he thought was the best player of all time in his history chapter. (he said either Kasparov or Fischer, but leaned towards Kasparov, which is reasonable. I expected a Complete Idiot's Guide to pick Pascal Charbonneau.) I wanted to see how he explained the schism, but didn't have time, as last-minute Christmas shopping took precedence.

I saw a copy of How to Beat Your Dad at Chess, but had no time to look. The chess selection at this Barnes & Noble was shockingly limited. They only had one shelf devoted to it. Maybe a dozen books total.





That's the impression I've always gotten from thumbing through it, I just never bothered to look more deeply to confirm.


I'm still not sure which Silman book people were talking about. My aim is still to find just one single book to give to a beginner to get him well on the road to being a decent player. Not an armload, which might tip him off about what he's getting into, and sending him running away screaming.

I think the hardest thing to do in a beginner's book is to explain how the pieces move without using diagrams. I used 149 diagrams in my little beginner's mono and I still wasn't satisfied with the result.

There aren't very many beginner's books that explain the piece movements without diagrams, are there? But, apart from the Knight, it's not that hard, is it?

With 149 diagrams, did you have readers who still didn't get it? Those might be candidates for checkers.

I've given away about fifty of them, but with no feedback. Most of them went to people who weren't tournament players.

Maybe they did take up checkers.

Which Silman book is this? I went to Amazon and saw two that looked close, but not quite right. One was called "Complete Endgame Course", or something like that, and other was "Complete Book of Chess Strategy".

It was How to Reassess Your Chess. Silman is rewriting it (or is finished now?) because there were numerous errors, mistakes, and he even said when he reread one chapter he wondered what the heck he was thinking. The book also had numerous spelling errors--it was like he had written it on a typewriter.

Just checked and the fourth edition is pretty much rewritten from the ground up (Silman says). It sounds rather good and is probably the book he envisioned when he wrote the first edition.

btw, his endgame book is simply fantastic. If I ever met him, that's the book I'd take to get autographed.

(As a beside, the Swedish Prime Minister is named Fredrik Reinfeldt.) A chess book that made a strong impression on me when I was in my late teens, struggling to become a better player, was Edmar Mednis: Practical Endgame Lessons (1978). I remember it was a real eye-opener. By the way, Mednis was the first player to beat Bobby Fischer in a United States Chess Championship tournament.

Mats

Did you read Mednis in English or Swedish? I'm curious; how many English chess texts get translated into Swedish?

Mednis was a very good writer. He did some great endgame columns in Chess Life & Review, and I wish he'd written more books. There was definitely a method to his... (nah, I can't say it!)

I read it in English. I also read those cheap books from DDR, Sportverlag Berlin, "Grünfeld-Indisch bis Königsindisch", etc. "Eine Zuverlässige Zug" was a very common commentary, I remember. Fischer's book was translated, of course, and Kotov's books. Otherwise, not much has been translated, I think. But it's not difficult to read chess books in foreign languages.

Mats