The Complete Chessplayer

This is a very good book for beginners and assumes no chess knowledge for the first of basically four parts. From the beginning the book relies on its greatest weakness, though. Descriptive notation is a notation system for recording chess games which was used in English, Spanish and French chess literature until about 1980. It has been superseded by algebraic notation, which is more concise and requires less effort to avoid ambiguity. This period book uses exclusively descriptive notation which is unfortunate.

Still, much practical and even sage advice is here for middling players like myself. An example of what resonated with me is:

Bishop and Knight are approximately of equal value. Among good players there is a definite preference

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for the Bishop, but considerable knowledge and experience are required to make the rather subtle distinction. The inexperienced player is better off to assess these pieces as of roughly equal strength. You are on safe ground, however, in assuming that two Bishops are more effective than a Bishop and Knight. There difference in mobility here can be appreciated even by players who are not too experienced.

The next part is an overview of a decent taxonomy of chess openings double and single king pawn, double and single queen pawn, and the catch-all for everything else: "eccentric". Finally, is a series of master-level games annotated for illustrative purposes.

Fancy a game? Challenge me on chess.com. show less

I tried to digest several chess books back in my college days, this is the one that made sense and grounded me in the basics.

3/4/22