It's a good book. you can study modern theory later. Fine explains the basic ideas you need to be familiar with to get started in an opening. It's like planting roots. There is know use in trying to deconstruct the semi-slav without knowing, first of all, what makes the Queen's Gambit tick.

<-The Soviet School of Chess- This was one of the first books that I ever read. Quite a romantic fairytale; highly dogmatic Soviet propaganda. Faults aside, an excellent read and wonderful source of information. I recommend it to every player interested in chess history.

-Play like a Grandmaster-
Not a bad book. Perhaps this became the model for future writers like Devoretsky.

-The Art of the Middle Game-
This book is perhaps the best collaborative effort of both Keres and Kotov, and one of the best chess books of the 20th century. I certainly found much value and inspiration in it , even after becoming a strong master!

-Think Like Grandmaster-
Perhaps Kotov's most famous book, and real crap! There is nothing in it for the practical player. It should be renamed: DREAM LIKE A GRANDMASTER! I know of no GM who has ever thought like he describes...

Let me summarize here the Q+Ps endgame principles that I think may come to govern this endgame. Highlighted are passages from <Ludek Pachman, 'Chess Endings for the Practical Player'>. It is a fairly good condensate of the knowledge up to the age of engines and table-bases.

(1) If the K's were off the board, a lone Q can not defend/stop/blockade a lone Q+P. This, of course, holds also for passed pawns. Therefore: (1.1) It is of utmost importance who has the more advanced pawns; that player is naturally on the attack. (1.2) Any successful defense, practically by necessity, involves an endless checking of the attacker's king.

(2) King's blockading 'help' seems to be more of a hindrance than a real help. By this, I mean that the team Q+K can not organize the blockade of Q+P+K any more effectively than the Q can blockade Q+P(+K) on its own. In fact, (2.1) in pure Q+K vs Q+K+P endgames the defense king does best when he just offers as small a target as possible somewhere kitty-corner from the promotion-related action. <...If you did not know this ending, this idea would never occur to you.> (Pachman.)

(3) Given the small number of pawns, 70-80% of our Q-endgame play will probably be essentially governed by the single pawn cases. Various transfers into pawn endgames will complicate things; the extra pawns on the board should generally be to our benefit with the Q's on, however. <...The greater the number of pawns, the greater the chance of utilizing a passed pawn...>

====
I will give more of Pachman's advice in next posts.
(original post: Team White vs Team Black, 2009 )

<The following principles should be observed in complicated queens endings with several pawns. (1) The queen should be used as actively as possible. It is an attacking piece!

(2) The king of the superior side should be sheltered from the opposite queen. Only when the events can be computed or at least evaluated should the king be used as and attacking piece.

(3) Whether a pawn is strong or week is of considerable importance. Week pawns that can be threatened by the queen are a great disadvantage.

(4) In the event of an available passed pawn the number of pawns on the board is no longer a decisive factor. Well advanced passed pawns can compensate for a substantial material disadvantage. >

(original post: Team White vs Team Black, 2009)

The book (at least its English version, which is the only one I have) is a mixed bag. But I have been often surprised how well it fits its advertised purpose; more often than not I find there the right advice at the right time. And that generally is not the case with many of the other endgame texts.

(original post: Team White vs Team Black, 2009)

After a bit of additional reflection, this is what I think of it:

While the book is not as well or vigorously written as Pachman's Strategy and Tactics books (e.g., his Strategy of Modern Chess), it is possibly the best of its genre. In turn, the genre is difficult and rare: an 'encyclopedic-select' of sorts, a book that tries to be encyclopedic and cover all important topics of a wide field, yet also tries to be select and practical and give the reader only the most important and pertinent information under each heading.

So, despite of some analytical errors (possibly due to a desire to simplify) and despite a generally uninspired production of the book, I have found it surprisingly well worth having.

There are some other, more recent endgame books that I find more fun to read; but those all seem of 'pure select' variety, where the author focuses on the juicier topics only. Nothing that I've seen on the encyclopedic side is nearly as easy to read and generally useful for me as the "Chess Endings for the Practical Player".

I've never seen this trilogy in English hardback, only black-cover paperbacks.

>

I think Spragget is pretty square on.

<Play like a GM> is a path-breaking book and it is a pretty good book on its own.

<Think like a GM> is a path-breaking book; but a rather blind-alley-dud on its own.

<Train like a GM> is a truly awful reversion to the worst of Kotov.

<School> (Kotov/Yudovich) is an interesting book; provided that the propaganda is either edited out that one can mode it out him/her self.

<Alekhine (Chess Inheritance)> A very fine chess book for its era. (Fairly manageable on propaganda and hard to go much wrong if one just the most spectacular games of AAA.)

Don't know the <Keres/Kotov>; Spraget's recommendation is glowing.

Reti - "I am often asked why I did not devote a chapter to Nimzowitsch in my book Modern Ideas in Chess – as a matter of fact one cannot portray him as a representative of the most modern school, just because of the way he handles the opening. Therefore I would like to express my opinion on Nimzowitsch. As is clearly seen from his articles and works, he personally considers himself to be the best positional player among his contemporaries. I cannot see anything in his games which is inherent in the new strategies – which, of course, does not prove that the new strategy does not actually appear in his games. This is not false modesty and not mere words, but I confess that Nimzowitsch’s strategy remains incomprehensible to me, since it is not possible to understand that which he himself has not mastered to perfection. If, however, I nevertheless hold the view that Nimzowitsch is not in fact superior in this respect to others, then, in my opinion, there are definite grounds for this. First of all, Nimzowitsch is one of the greatest combinational players who have ever lived; his numerous, far-calculated and unusually original combinations are generally well-known. Furthermore, anyone who knows Nimzowitsch personally, knows that he possesses colossal routine, as do few other masters. He is one of the best coffee-house and blitz players. Therefore he makes blunders extremely rarely, far more rarely than other masters of the first rank; when he has a winning position, as a definite rule he also actually wins. If, however, despite his recent successes in great international tournaments (after the War he took part in the Gothenborg and Carlsbad tournaments; in the first he failed to win a prize, whereas in the latter he took sixth-seventh place), he did not prove himself to be amongst the very top masters, then it is clear that his strategical conception of the game is his weak point. The following game represents an interesting example of how, in a difficult position, he will readily worsen his game still further, if only to create a situation favoring the creation of various combinational possibilities." (The game was from Baden Baden 1925)

Difficult to know what motivated Reti to make those comments about Nimzowitsch. He may have been jealous as you said. He may also have believed what he said.

There is after all a logic in his analysis. How true it is depends on the premise that Nimzowitsch <is one of the greatest combinational players who has ever lived>. This would be hard to prove.

If by <the very top masters> Reti means Capablanca, Alekhine and Lasker, then history would seem to agree with Reti that Nimzowitsch was on a slightly lesser tier. If Nimzowitsch was superior to Reti, as your stats indicate, that only means Reti too did not belong among the very top.

It seems to me that in those days differing philosophies over how the game should be played were deeply felt. It is very possible that Reti experienced a visceral revulsion for a style of play he did not understand. If that is true, he was not alone.

He asked me if I knew that Reti did not think much of Nimzo in some writings, but thought the world of him in others.

I did not knew that, and so I set myself for my dad's follow up quiz question: "Can you guess what event prompted Reti to change his mind?" And after a brief moment he gave me a hint: "It actually is very logical, if you think about it."

The answer was that Reti completely changed his view, from an amusement to outright admiration, when Nimzo published "My System".

---

As for the relative practical strength of Reti and Nimzo. Reti got arguably as close to the absolute top in the early 1920's as Nimzo got to a couple of other times. But Reti was absolutely uninterested in chasing after the crown. His love was in chess discovery, in composition, and in his chess writing.

There are often great buys on eBay but you have to look often. Lots of chess book sellers and www.abe.com is a good resource...I find many of the dealers will bargain some.

" So many people write chess books nowadays that we tend to look at moves or content and overlook that these people can't write. "

-- Jeremy Silman

<These days you're not going to beat a lot of people by just sitting there waiting for your opponent to self-destruct....Secondly, not too many games are going to be decided by a memory contest. Somebody wins a theoretical duel, then proceeds to lose the game – an almost everyday occasion.>

<Sooner or later players find themselves out there on their own, and the outcome of the battle will be decided by matching their middlegame skills.>

<Chess players study openings to get to favorable middlegame positions. And you must think about the future. It is much better to take on some openings that will serve you for years to come, rather than restrict yourself to primitive set-ups designed to avoid theory.>

<...new developments that make your individually designed variations obsolete, the ideas will still be the same, thus valid, and they can be re-used within the newly set bounds of current fashion. Your opening just goes to the repair shop, that's all.>

Yermolinsky thinks the most painful way to learn a new opening is to study it until you're “ready.” When, if ever, is one “ready?” Granted, just plunging in is easier if you're playing mostly weaker competition, but there's something to be said about diving straight in with a lot of short-to-medium length games (perhaps using an online account where the rating doesn't matter) or playing an engineset at an appropriate strength. You have to be willing to lose some games early in this process. The key would be to go back over these games later and begin to compare your attempts with theory and try to decide if the resulting middlegames are to your liking. “To your liking” is where self-evaluation has to meet honesty. There's little use in struggling to become a Sicilian expert if you're a fish out of water in typical Sicilian middlegames.

<There are certain limits to one's chess knowledge, and believe me, most chess players I know, myself included, know chess better than they play it.>

<No matter how good you are, quality opposition will every once in a while put you in a spot, and that is a real test of your chess-playing skills. Yes, grandmasters are subjected to it relatively less often, as their opening knowledge extends deeper into the middlegame and often gets connected with the specific knowledge of typical endgames that might be arising at the end of a forced, thus calculable, line. Thus, a 2600+ grandmaster can and will defeat less sophisticated opposition with apparent ease. There's nothing mysterious about his ability to keep the flow of the game under control, simply because he operates from a position of superior knowledge and hardly has to take any non-linear decisions – junctions where he might go wrong – until his technique can take over.>

In his younger days, one of Yermolinsky's contemporaries looked at Yermolinsky's opening preparation for a specific opponent and exclaimed, “Oh, so that's what you are! You want to win games for free.” Maybe we all want things “for free” at times. The “quick fix” can be seductive. Over-reliance on one-size-fits-all repertoire systems, reluctance to critically analyze one's own games, distaste for endgame study, and other sins are common, but I don't want to be the one to cast the first pawn. If one's goals are modest, these need not be mortal transgressions. However, grander goals require more effort.

I think it is difficult to write books for more advanced players because they need different things, “rules” become less useful as they improve, and they have to do much of the work themselves. So the road to enlightenment is not an easy or straight one, and at some point we each have to blaze our own paths. How to best balance study and play on a limited time budget is a juggling act many of us, myself included, have yet to master.