Square One: A Chess Drill Book for Beginners

by Bruce Pandolfini

From America’s foremost chess coach and game strategist for Netflix’s The Queen’s Gambit comes t he best chess drill book for beginners of all ages.

From ever-popular chess instructor Bruce Pandolfini comes this entertaining, interactive, and effective book for teaching young chess players and other newcomers to the game. Filled with hundreds of questions and answers, fill-in-the-blanks, and true-or-false posers, Square One combines traditional chess drills with diverting games and problems to stimulate the analytical skills of beginners of all ages.

Besides covering the basics—the board, moves, rules, and notation— Square One goes on to include information on attacks, checkmate, draws, and special rules, giving the beginner a broad overview of the game. With more than 200 instructional diagrams, and answers to all questions and problems, it is a complete workbook for chess players starting at square one.

Genres: Chess

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1989

About the author

Bruce Pandolfini (born September 17, 1947) is an American chess author, teacher, and coach. A USCF national master, he is generally considered to be America’s most experienced chess teacher. As a coach and trainer, Pandolfini has possibly conducted more chess sessions than anyone in the world. By the summer of 2015 he had given an estimated 25,000 private and group lessons.

(Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Pato Salazar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like many people during these pandemic times, chess has become one of my favourites online activities. I have been playing pretty much every day since March of 2020, and I was reaching a point when my knowledge of the game was not enough to move from a beginner player to an intermediate one. Lucky for me, this book was laying around at my mother in law’s house and I decided to read it to be able to build a strong basic chess foundation before taking on something more technical.

Now this book is deceiving in a good way. If you are able to play chess in any capacity, you should know the concepts presented here already - how the pieces move, what is a check, what is mate, what is castling. It strikes you at the beginning as a book that might be very, very basic, maybe not for you. But then the practical exercises begin and it is a whole other story.

It relentlessly challenge your ability to envision the board and to recognize patterns for all the different concepts. And there is something very special about solving the puzzles with pen and paper, as it forces you to keep the board in your mind instead of relying on a computer to enforce the rules of the game. I felt that built my ability to keep the other piece in mind when evaluating my next move. That bishop on the other side of the board that makes castling long the best option. That check that only has one route to escape. Exercises like this put you on the path to start thinking like a true chess player, even when you might have an elo of 900, as it was my case when I started the book.

As with everything that requires practice, a strong foundation is the key element to achieve excellence, and this book is capable of providing it. I highly recommend it.

[David Runyon · Rating 4 out of 5]

I saw a noticeable improvement in my chess skills after working through this book. If you know a bit of chess, you can skip the first few chapters about how the pieces move and how notation works.

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great 'basics' book.

[Corey Butler · Rating 2 out of 5]

I generally like Pandolfini's books, but this one is too elementary, even for a complete beginner.

[Ernest · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent book to teach a 4-6 year old child the game of chess.