This is a good chess book for beginners. In this review, I will highlight its strengths and weaknesses.
First, what is this book? This is a collection of grandmaster games with commentary given by Irving Chernev. The book is divided into three major sections: The Kingside attack, the Queen's pawn opening, and then a final section (The Master Explains His Ideas) of games illustrating all the techniques presented before. The book is best described as a "beginner's strategy" book. It does not focus on tactics, but rather the overarching principles of how games, and attacks, are conducted. Each game takes about half and hour to work through, which makes this book nice for adults with jobs and family obligations who cannot devote a substantial amount of time each day to chess.
The strengths of this book are manifold:
(1) It will get beginner players out of the habit of playing random moves. The beginner will enter a game with some idea of what they need to do to carry out a successful attack, and they will move pieces accordingly. This, right here, is reason enough why beginning chess players should read this book.
(2) The reader will get exposure to a handful of important openings: the Italian Game, the Ruy Lopez, the Colle, and the Queen's Gambit. All these openings are good for the beginning player to become familiar with, and each one has a general strategy attached to it. Chernev does a good job of explaining the ideas behind these openings with the one exception of the Ruy Lopez.
(3) This book will change your style of play, and ultimately improve it if you are a beginner. There will be a learning curve, where the reader tries to implement the material in this book, and don't quite do it successfully. That's fine. It will take time to integrate everything he teaches into your own style of play.
(4) The annotations scale upwards as the reader progresses (but not as much as they should, see my first negative comment). The beginning games are almost all wordy explanations of what is happening, and by the middle Chernev is having the reader compute a handful of variations, and integrating the results into their analysis of a position.
Now for the negatives,
(1) The annotations are at a uniformly low level. There are 32 (I think) games in this book, and the annotations don't scale up as much as I would like. I only need to be told a few times that 1. e4 or 1. d4 is a great move! because it frees two pieces and fights for the center. I don't need to be told every time. Use that paragraph to put in another small calculation.
(2) Chernev, and I hate to say this, is probably telling the reader a bunch of lies with his analysis. I don't mean that he's saying anything that's wrong, but grandmaster games aren't played on the basis of explanations that a sub-1200 USCF player would understand. The actual rationale for the moves is far more sophisticated. This doesn't mean that the book is bad for a beginner, it just means that they will quickly outgrow this book.
(3) This is a book on strategy, and so very few tactical considerations are addressed. That's fine, the book isn't a tactics book. But this cannot be the only book a beginner reads.
(4) This is going to be my biggest complaint. There simply isn't enough material here. This book does too little with the 250-ish page length. This book has two major themes, how to attack a castled kingside position by weakening the pawn structure, and how to exert pressure on the c file in the Queen's Gambit position. Ever game in the first two sections ends in the middle game with a mate or a resignation due to an overwhelming material advantage stemming from one of those two ideas. The reader will not learn basic endgame concepts like opposition of kings, how to win in basic rook+pawn ending, or even how to grind down your opponent with a material advantage (can you win when you're up a bishop and need to promote a pawn?). If the reader can't win in the middle game, they won't win according to this book.
All in all, I do think this book is worth reading. However, it can not be the only book a beginner reads, and it certainly isn't the best beginner book. If you're looking for a single book to take you to an intermediate playing ability, Tarrasch's *The Game of Chess* is much better than this. However, if you're willing to buy two books, this one will be a great compliment to Tarrasch.
EDIT: It's been quite a bit of time since I've posted my original review, which I have left above. In that review, I gave this book four stars. Since then, I have re-read this book and have decided to give it a deserving fifth star. The reason is that I was too harsh in my criticism that the book does too little for the amount of pages. The book is sneaky in that it's teaching you quite a bit more than just the explicit thematic content. For example, there are 16 games in the opening section (the kingside attack). My original complaint would be valid if, in those sixteen games, the exact same ideas and mating patterns occurred within each. However, the games are chosen as to present a vast array of openings and middle game strategies.
There are several games which I have marked out in my book and intend to memorize them because of how masterfully they illustrate the strategies tied to the various openings. For example, the very first game (von Scheve - Teichmann, Berlin 1907) is a masterful display of how to defend against the Guioco Piano. I've memorized the first batch of moves and have modeled my own defense in my tournament play based on this game. Similarly, the 9th game (Znosko-Borovsky - Mackenzie, Weston-super-Mare 1924) is a display par excellence of the closed Ruy Lopez. As a Ruy Lopez player, it was wonderful to see such a beautiful display of how the opening ideas flow into a middle game positional play, and how that flows into creating weaknesses in the enemy position. I will be sure to study this game very carefully to extract as much gold from it as I can. I have marked out five games in the opening section which I have found particularly relevant and worthy of deep study. Perhaps other players with other preferences will have their own opinions on which games are most instructive.
I was foolish to initially claim that the book does too little. After re-reads, I am very impressed with the amount of content here.
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Jamil4
Only a few pages in but great book so far
Reviewed in Canada on January 20, 2024Rafa
Para quem quer começar a entender o jogo
Reviewed in Brazil on January 17, 2024
