If you have read my previous post, you know that I don't consider chess books essential to start playing chess. Most chess books are written in a cryptical way that makes absorbing the new knowledge difficult for a beginner. And not only for the beginner…Like for other subjects, good books are the ones that explain difficult things in a simple way and that effectively help you to become a better player. Like for other subjects, most books range between not particularly good (many), OK-ish (majority), and very good (few). I own around 100 chess books. When I started taking chess seriously (playing international tournaments and studying regularly), good books helped me a lot. I don’t want to give the impression that books are useless. However, I have rarely read a book that I found great from page 1 until the end. This is why in this post I want to try to help you save some money!
We shall talk about chess opening books, which is the majority of existing chess literature. Chess players spend a lot of time studying opening because it’s the only phase of the game that you can’t avoid. Understandably, we like to feel safe when we play the first moves, and we want to be sure we know what we are doing. Fair enough. But do chess opening books really help us with it?
Traditional chess opening books are endless lists of moves with no comments. If you are old enough to have seen the ECO books you are aware of the brainless mnemonic exercise required. Modern chess opening books improved in their general aspects (we have diagrams and comments), but the structure of the book hasn’t changed much. We still have hierarchical sequences of moves that the reader is expected to memorise. Perplexed? I bought too many of these books before realising how much money I was waisting. In fact, the knowledge based only on memory is rarely solid knowledge. It’s enough to be busy for a few weeks to forget everything you “learned” and be basically at the starting point again. My suggestion is do not buy chess opening books until you get to the master level, and maybe even then consider carefully if you really need them. I am a FIDE master, and I rather prefer to study openings searching given positions in the ChessBase.
Good chess opening books should talk about the pawn structure, general ideas for White and Black, which pieces would be better to exchange and which ones should be kept, and typical endgames arising from the middlegame. Illustrative games should be welcome. I am not going to spend a dime more for a book that does not discuss those.
There are two books that I can recommend. The first focuses on pawn structures: Chess Structures – A Grandmaster Guide by Grand Master Flores Rios. Ideally, a specific book on a certain opening should be structured like this book and should go deeper in detail.
The other (if you would like to play the Scandinavian) is The Modern Scandinavian: Themes, Structures & Plans in an Increasingly Popular Chess Opening by Grand Masters Wahls and Müller, and International Master Langrock. The authors divided the chapters based on the pawn structures and the general ideas rather than on the sequences of moves, and the theoretical appendix is just a small section at the end of the book! I wish there were more of those books. For the moment, you can use the money you saved for the registration fee of a chess tournament, or for supporting your local chess club!
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