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The Road to Chess Improvement
"How can I improve my game?" is a perennial question facing chess-players. While there are no easy answers, Alex Yermolinsky is better qualified than most to offer advice. Having found the famed "Soviet School of Chess" wanting, he trained himself, slowly but surely raising his game to top-class grandmaster standard. In this book, he passes on many of the insights he has gained over the years. He steers the reader away from "quick fix" approaches, and focuses on the critical areas of chess understanding and over-the-board decision-making. This entertainingly written book breaks new ground in many areas of chess understanding. Topics covered Trend-Breaking Tools; The Burden of Small Advantages; What Exchanges Are For; Classics Revisited; and Computer Chess. A large part of the book discusses a variety of important opening set-ups, including methods for opposing offbeat but dangerous lines, such as the Grand Prix Attack.
- GenresChess
224 pages, Paperback
First published January 22, 2000
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
September 8, 2018
As someone who is fond of chess [1], I have often wondered at the appeal for writing chess books for those who are chess champions or are looking to be considered as serious contenders for the world championship. Most chess books come with at least the implicit promise that reading it will provide a method that will improve one's chess rating, through the adoption of some sort of gambit or attack or approach. This author, however, makes no such promises. It is likely that most of the potential readers of this book would not have ever heard of the author, whose rating is on the low end of Grandmasters and who made a living as a teacher as well as through earning money in various opens, and who was a solidly second-tier Soviet player before moving to the United States and enjoying the less serious competition here. So, if this book does not promise one is going to be a chessmaster, what does it offer? It offers sweat, toil, and tears and the commitment to study games and play them to improve one's understanding of the position and be willing to analyze what went wrong and what can go better next time.
In a bit more than 200 pages, the author talks about various games. First, though, before talking about any of them he provides a discussion of symbols and looks at what this book is really about--pointing out how indecisiveness is evil and that human beings (though not computers) are ruled by emotions and not as rational as we like to think of ourselves. The first part of the book introduces the issue of trends, turning points, and emotional shifts in games (I), and takes up about 40 pages, where the author uses various games to illustrate trend-breaking tools and questions of preserving or disrupting the status quo of a game. After that the author spends almost 100 pages looking at openings and early mid-game structures (II), including the Queen's Gambit Declined, the Grunfeld defense, the Benko, Benoni, Grand Prix, Sicilian, and Double Fianchetto. The third part of the book discusses tactical mastery and strategic skills for about 50 pages, looking at the purpose of exchanges, the author's own miseducation, and combinatorial understanding, before ending with a brief discussion about computer chess and its recent popularity.
This book is by no means a new one--it was published in 1999, and it is the sort of book that could use some revisiting, if the author is willing and able to do so, with an expansion on computer chess given its ubiquity, as well as the joys of playing chess online. Even so, this book is a good one and the fact that the author was not a wunderkind who soared to the top of the super GM ranks allows him to speak with a fair bit of credibility to others whose chess game is more about struggling for victory and less about being a prodigy. Whether or not this book actually inspires its readers on the road to chess improvement is hard to say, but the tips the author provides are solid ones to improve in any endeavor: work hard, practice well, study one's own actions and also study the best and what they do, and be flexible and look for the best move rather than being doctrinaire in one's approach to chess. The advice here is generally sound, and the fact that it comes from a chess journeyman gives it a hard-worn quality that can be appreciated by those who are likely to be far from the ranks of chess stardom themselves.
[1] See, for example:
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2018...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2011...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2018...
In a bit more than 200 pages, the author talks about various games. First, though, before talking about any of them he provides a discussion of symbols and looks at what this book is really about--pointing out how indecisiveness is evil and that human beings (though not computers) are ruled by emotions and not as rational as we like to think of ourselves. The first part of the book introduces the issue of trends, turning points, and emotional shifts in games (I), and takes up about 40 pages, where the author uses various games to illustrate trend-breaking tools and questions of preserving or disrupting the status quo of a game. After that the author spends almost 100 pages looking at openings and early mid-game structures (II), including the Queen's Gambit Declined, the Grunfeld defense, the Benko, Benoni, Grand Prix, Sicilian, and Double Fianchetto. The third part of the book discusses tactical mastery and strategic skills for about 50 pages, looking at the purpose of exchanges, the author's own miseducation, and combinatorial understanding, before ending with a brief discussion about computer chess and its recent popularity.
This book is by no means a new one--it was published in 1999, and it is the sort of book that could use some revisiting, if the author is willing and able to do so, with an expansion on computer chess given its ubiquity, as well as the joys of playing chess online. Even so, this book is a good one and the fact that the author was not a wunderkind who soared to the top of the super GM ranks allows him to speak with a fair bit of credibility to others whose chess game is more about struggling for victory and less about being a prodigy. Whether or not this book actually inspires its readers on the road to chess improvement is hard to say, but the tips the author provides are solid ones to improve in any endeavor: work hard, practice well, study one's own actions and also study the best and what they do, and be flexible and look for the best move rather than being doctrinaire in one's approach to chess. The advice here is generally sound, and the fact that it comes from a chess journeyman gives it a hard-worn quality that can be appreciated by those who are likely to be far from the ranks of chess stardom themselves.
[1] See, for example:
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2018...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2011...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2018...
December 19, 2021
It is a very good book with regards to the topics discussed but I have some minor criticisms:
- I feel it is not written in the most didactic way. What I mean is that there are treasures to be found, but you really have to work and find them. They do not jump out at you. So, the layout could have probably been better.
- I find that the topics discussed do not (try to) cover all aspects of the game. Whatever is discussed, is done so in an insightful manner, however.
For me, it is a good 3-star book, overall.
Update: After delving deeper and deeper into this work I have increased the rating to 4 stars. The reason for this is that the author seems very honest in his writing. This is a great quality in a chess book, where I have often seen self-praising and/or unrealistic annotations, which make it extremely hard for the naive amateur to evaluate the material.
Here, this is not the case. It is possible to follow the decision-making processes of the GM author. And once I realised this an regarded the book more as a games collection, my assessment of it improved significantly!
- I feel it is not written in the most didactic way. What I mean is that there are treasures to be found, but you really have to work and find them. They do not jump out at you. So, the layout could have probably been better.
- I find that the topics discussed do not (try to) cover all aspects of the game. Whatever is discussed, is done so in an insightful manner, however.
For me, it is a good 3-star book, overall.
Update: After delving deeper and deeper into this work I have increased the rating to 4 stars. The reason for this is that the author seems very honest in his writing. This is a great quality in a chess book, where I have often seen self-praising and/or unrealistic annotations, which make it extremely hard for the naive amateur to evaluate the material.
Here, this is not the case. It is possible to follow the decision-making processes of the GM author. And once I realised this an regarded the book more as a games collection, my assessment of it improved significantly!
June 7, 2022
Yermo clearly works really hard on his chess, improving with a passion. I learned a ton from playing through his games, reading his annotations and understanding his psychology in certain games and positions. I look forward to continuing to build on my chess understanding, intuition, and come closer to the truth in my analysis of certain positions.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews