Steve's Reviews > How to Reassess Your Chess: Chess Mastery Through Chess Imbalances

16JAN11. It won't arrive until the middle of the week. But when it does I'll dive right in. Going through the 3rd edition of How To Reassess Your Chess was an INVALUABLE experience. It opened my eyes to aspects of the game to which I previously had been oblivious. Supposedly Silman completely rewrote the book ("from scratch" was the phrase that caught my eye) greatly expanded it, rearranged it, chopped out the Basic Endgame chapter (the chapter that inexplicably OPENED the 3rd edition!), and added a 90 page section on the psychological aspects of the game (Silman has a two-page mention of this topic in his 1998 Complete Book of Chess Strategy which served the digest-like purpose of that volume but left this reader wanting more.)

19JAN11. It's here, and let me just point out that if you consider the physicality of reading an important part of a good read (how a book feels in your hands, how the pages feel as you turn them; Kindle and other eBooks be damned*) then straight out of the box this book will satisfy. In fact, if you got a copy of Silman's mammoth Complete Endgame Course and wondered, "what would it be like if Reassess was this big?", well wonder no longer; The 4th edition looks and feels nearly identical to the Endgame book. Silman does claim that he completely rewrote the book knowing that of the dozen or so books he's written, this is the one that will be around when he's long gone: he wanted to do it up right. And if you've read the deservedly famous 3rd edition you know that there were typesetting issues and other minor things that didn't detract from the quality of the instruction but kept you (or at least me) from thinking the thing had been meticulously proofed.

Forget about all that: this is one elegant volume. I can not WAIT to immerse myself in it!!
(More commentary to come of course)
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*(I know I'm pretty luddite about that, and fighting a rapidly disintegrating battle--like senior citizens who avoid cell phones or voice mail or even computers--but still.)

23JAN11. Bigger, more polished, and unquestionably: funnier! I expect I'll be spending the next year + of my life with this book, and that is NOT a daunting thought!

26MAR11. When work and life get busy chess is the first thing that takes a hit, sadly; This will probably have to wait for the summer.