Whats your favorite chess book?

[vulturesrow]

Mine is a tossup between How Not to Play Chess and Simple Chess by Stean.

[wacki]

The whole Yasser Seirawan collection.

[Kopefire]

Zurich International Chess Tournament, 1953
by David Bronstein

The only possible contender is

Life & Games of Mikhail Tal
by Mikhail Tal

[Cyrus]

"My 60 Memorable Games" by Bobby Fischer (original descriptive edition, avoid the execrable Batsford job). Fischer exhibits total honesty and objectivity in an informative and educational tour of his most memorable encounters. Probably unsurpassed as self-penned books about one's games go.

The best challenge to Fischer's book comes with Viktor Korchnoi's two tomes of "My Best Games" (one tome for Korchnoi playing White, one for Black). Brilliant throughout, both as objective, educational analysis and as entertaining prose.

"Russians Against Bobby Fischer" by Dmitry Plisetsky & Sergey Voronkov. (In English, published in Moscow.) You get to know that everything you always feared and Bobby protested (in vain) about the Soviets ganging up on the American champion are true! Fascinating accounts of the inner workings of the Soviet system. You can't help but finish this book with some sense of melancholy for all those young men chasing windmills, but underneath it all, the Soviet GMs and Fischer, sharing a deep admiration for each other's dedication to the passion of their lives.

"Understanding Chess Move By Move" John Nunn. It's like having a grandmaster sitting down with you and going through about two dozen games and teaching you in the process about openings, strategy, tactics, traps and the like, all in simple but eloquent prose.

In the same instructive/educational vein, I like very much "Training for the tournament player" by Mark Dvoretsky and Artur Yusupov, because it's practical and straightforward, along with "Test your positional ability" by Robert Bellin and Pietro Ponzetto, whose exercises are sure to start one thinking positionally and not just 'tactically'.

The three volumes by the unique chess writer Edward Winter, "Chess Explorations", "Kings, Commoners and Knaves" and "A Chess Omnibus" are indispensable for anyone interested in the trivia, minutae and history of Chess. In the bargain, you get to learn what true meticulousness and objectivity are in criticism -- in any field. These would be the last Chess books I'd part with.

As far as chess "encyclopaedias" are concerned, my favorite is "The Oxford Companion to Chess" by David Hooper & Kenneth Whyld, because it is all-encompassing without being tiring. Most of one's questions about the game should be answered here, and in high quality writing too. This is how encyclopaedias (of any kind) should be written. At the end of the book, look up the huge and extremely meticulous nomenclature of all opening variations.

Genna Sosonko's "Russian Silhouettes" is a very touching book of profiles of various Soviet masters of an era that recently eneded, all told with humility, humanity and a sense of unavoidable loss. We will never see the likes of these (literally) gentlemen again.

"Chess Mysteries of Sherlock Holmes" by Raymond Smullyan (and not Conan Doyle...) is an exceptionally entertaining book with retro-analysis mind-bending puzzles, presented as part of Sherlock Holmes' "detective work".

"Kasparov versus Deep Blue : Computer Chess comes of age" by Monty Newborn contains the account of Kasparov's first (and won) match against the IBM monster and the best presentation of computer chess so far.

I don't much care for books with "thickets of variations", but if that's your cup of coffee, you could do worse than looking up "Romantic Chess Openings" by Vladimir Zagorovsky, full of the kind of stuff that makes the blood of any chessman boil, still, after three centuries! At the antipode of this feeling comes "Ruy Lopez : Breyer System" by L. S. Blackstock. Impress you friends with your "deep positional understanding" by retreating Black's queen knight back to b8!..



AVOID anything by Fred Reinfeld, Raymond Keene and Larry Evans -- and you can't go wrong.

[Kopefire]

Actually, Keene's earlier writtings, when he was still a formidable chess player, and had yet to turn into a hapless shill bragging about how quickly he could turn out a chess book, are worth a read. And he somehow managed to produce a truly good work in "Nimzovich: A Reappraisal." However, in general, avoiding Keene is good advice.

I'd also suggest that Reinfeld's "1001 . . ." books are decent problem collections that are worth owning.

[Knockwurst]

As others have stated:

Bronstein's Zurich Intl. Tournament
Life and Games of M. Tal
60 Memorable Games B. Fischer
My System by A. Nimzovitch


I would add:

Any game collection annotated by A. Alehkine, who may be the best annotator ever. See New York 1927 Tournament, Alehkine's games collection annotated by Alehkine.

[theBruiser500]

Nunn is a great chess writer.