Chess books?

[Pokerpun]

Chernev is good for a guy at your level - Irving chernev really gets his love for the game over to the reader in his books.

"The 62 Most Instructive Games of Chess ever Played" is real inspiring

[checkmate36]

Tactics are very important.

http://www.chesstactics.org/ is one of the best sites I have seen. Lots of good stuff if you have the time.

[BigF]

One book that'll gain you at least 200 points: Sharpen Your Tactics by Anatoly Lein.

[MicroBob]

geez guys. books that will 'improve his game 200 points' doesn't sound at all appropriate for this novice player who doesn't even have a rating and perhaps hasn't even read any books with any chess notation yet.
Not positive though not having dug through a lot of the books mentioned either in a long time or ever.

But I'm pretty darned sure that some of the books recommended are too advanced for the OP's purposes.

Curtains will hopefully respond to this thread. I'm going to PM him.

To the OP - Curtains is a pretty well known chess player who now plays poker full-time. He also has a lot of experience teaching chess to kids, novices and intermediate players.
So whatever he recommends then pretty much just do that.


Also - to all the chess aficiandos in this thread:
There was a recent thread in the News, Views, Gossip forum that may be of interest to you.
Two high-stakes poker-players are talking about chess. One of them declares he oould beat ANYBODY if he was given rook odds. They bet $50k on it.
Curtains was 'hired' to prove him wrong.
Reading the whole thread will take you at least an hour I'm guessing. But it's fascinating stuff.

Or you can skip to near the end of the thread and find the article on the US Chess website that Curtains wrote about the whole affair.

[6471849653]

The first is a good book of tactics. The next will be some basic openings book that's a good introduction to openings, then a book about strategy, positional play, a couple of pages about basic endgames (no such "book" out but some web pages may be out there) then a good middle endgame book (between the opening and the endgame, the latter part of the middle game). Amazon is a good place to find the best books.

Finally one gets specific openings books or DVDs about the systems one wants to play (the books will do also but if they don't have DVDs too that include the variations too then it's extra effort to put them on the board, and if they have those then it would be as good as just a DVD).

A chessbase interface with a chess engine like Fritz ( http://www.chessbase.com/shop/ though one can buy it from anywhere)(that also has a reasonable openings book - the fritz book - included so one can study openings, though a bigger one completely worked is better when one is more experienced - it's months [full time] of work to make it good and can't be recommended until one gets really serious. Freechess.org (FICS) is free (like the Winboard and Arena interfaces and engines to them, both that one can use at Freechess.org too) but one gets to play with the chessbase interface too at Playchess.com and it's the best if one is any serious, though there's also the Internet Chess Club (ICC) that one can try (up to two or even several times in the long run) for free.

- one chess newsgroup: rec.games.chess.misc
- www.youtube.com for some videos.