These are my 999th and 1,000th posts to CG. That's about 900 more than I ever thought I'd make, but that's neither here nor there. Recent discussions on improvement got me to thinking again about this book I read a few years ago:

AUTHOR [Yermolinsky, Alex]
TITLE [The Road to Chess Improvement]
PUBLISHER [Gambit Publications, 2000]
LEVEL [intermediate/advanced]

In a world where teenage grandmasters are common (Anand quipped, “If you're not a GM by 14, forget it!”), there is something different about a player who doesn't reach the title until his 30s (Yermolinsky was born 1958, and became a GM in 1992). In fact, his lack of improvement was what finally got him to seriously apply himself to the single piece of advice most often given and least often followed: <study your own games>. Yermolinsky was 28 years old and had been playing for 20 years before he really began to do this systematically.

Overall, <Road> is something of a hybrid book. Yermolinsky's introduction calls it a collection of his games, but it is far from a typical “best games” collection. He is quite willing to include his losses to illustrate various points. It is not a “pure” instructional book either. Despite the title, Yermolinsky does not have a “system” to improvement, rather he talks about his successes, failures, and false starts on his own road.

Yermolinsky has no interest in writing a standard educational text aimed at beginners. Those books are fine as far as they go, but where do you go when you're well past a beginner but far from mastery? In reflecting on his own experience growing up in the USSR, Yermolinsky writes:

<Many things have been said about the Soviet School of Chess and how it produced legions of good players due to the elaborate system of chess education. I tell you what, the picture in the western eyes is distorted. There was no building bearing the sign, “The Soviet School of Chess.” There were no secret methods of teaching, no 800 numbers with grandmasters standing by to give you chess advice 24 hours a day. “I would have been a much better player if I had been born in the Soviet Union,” is what I often hear from underachieving chessplayers, and I wonder what makes them think so. In my 30 years of tournament experience, I have seen a lot of bad players, and most of them lived in the Soviet Union. With that kind of attitude, those complaining underachievers would still have been bad players even if they had been born in the USSR.>

Beyond a certain level of training and instruction, Yermolinsky says progress was very much a Darwinian struggle for survival where each player was responsible for doing the lion's share of the hard work required for advancement.

<Road> is not an opening book by any measure, but Yermolinsky spends a lot of time on openings, both in specific lines and talking about them in general, probably because opening preparation is so crucial to a working GM.

Yermolinksy says he starts to learn an opening by playing it. He agrees with John Watson that improvement at chess is similar to learning a second language. He thinks you need to “take a plunge... and learn it from the inside.”

<Chess is a hard enough game to present you with a challenge and the last thing we need is to worry about “doing the right thing,” which means following the positional rules that are, in fact, not more than statistical probabilities, distorted by the selection criteria chosen by the authors of chess books.>

After playing the opening some, Yermolinsky begins to backtrack from theory to a position he feels he understands, and then slowly works forward from there. He needs to verify current theory to his own satisfaction:

<...any theoretical recommendations will be taken into account with a certain dash of skepticism, if only because I believe they are based on nothing else but hasty evaluations of someone else's games, often biased by the final result.>

The chapters are then subdivided into "Strategic Ideas" "Tactical Ideas" "Illustrative Games".

So for example the Samisch Center chapter has as its Strategic Ideas things like: "The kingside attacking plan with the KN on e2" and the "Center Counter f7-f5".

Almost every section has a pawn structure diagram.

I have no idea if it is any good, but it appears to be the kind of book I have been looking for albeit for the KID only.

Life being very short, and the quiet hours of it few, we ought to waste none of them in reading valueless books.

lately I am more and more intrigued by the play of <Tigran Vartanovich Petrosian>.

So I wondered I anyone has some favourite books on him, since I am seriously interested in getting one. Preferably one with lots of games and annotations by the Petrosian himself.

At the moment I only have Kasparovs OMGP, part III. It's great of course, but I think that, compared to the other volumes, the part on Petrosian (and Spassky) is somewhat "short".

Clarke also did a book on Tal, which is also supposed to be good.

thank you for the advice. The reviews on the book do certainly look promising.

It would appear that Silman is fond of Clarke's work on Petrosian, too.

All of them quite good, IMHO, so no particular order:

Petrosian's Games of Chess - Clarke
Petrosian vs the Elite - Keene/Simpole
Petrosian's Legacy - Petrosian
Petrosian the Powerful - Soltis/Smith
Tigran Petrosjan - Weltgeschiche des Schachs, #26

Wade's book on the 1963 match with Botvinnik is very good.

These are the ones where he explains Nimzo's famous My System with modern updates, they are 2 hours each and about $20.

I have My System but I don't have a happy relationship with it, after many efforts at being reasonable we are no longer on speaking terms. If these DVD's are just as tough I won't waste my money, but if not, could be a valuable purchase :-)

Re: Petrosian - totally agree; excellent points.

Although he's considered somewhat dry, he is, in my opinion, a very capable anaylst (in particular concerning endgames).

People seem to love that one - or hate it. I like it.