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    Entries in beginner's books (2)

    Tuesday
    Mar152016

    Book Notice: Reinfeld's *The Complete Chess Course*

    Fred Reinfeld, The Complete Chess Course, 21st Century Edition. (Russell Enterprises, 2016.) 288 pp., $24.95.

    Fred Reinfeld (1910-1964) was an insanely prolific writer (and not just on chess) and a strong master as well. Despite his achievements in chess, most of his contributions to the literature of our game were aimed at novices and lower-level club players. The book under review here, originally published in 1959, is just such a book. Americans around my age will remember the black cover with the infinite chessboard, and the book's thickness. It was a 704 page monster that probably filled its owner with the confident belief that if he could just work his way through the whole thing he'd be ready to whip everyone but the club pro. (I was dumbfounded to see that the current edition runs just 288 pages - a substantial size in its own right, but skinny compared to the older version.)

    The book was not one of my first books, but at some point, when I was 10 or 11, I picked up a copy and brought it with me on a vacation to Greece, along with another book of the same era, The Soviet School of Chess. (Both books were in print years before I was born; I'm not that old.) All I remember about the CCC (as opposed to the book about chess in the CCCP) could be summed up in results. When I left, I was scoring around 80% against my best friend, and when I came back two months later, after a steady diet of weak opposition and Reinfeld's book, it was more like 55-60%. (I'm reminded of an old joke. Question: How do you make a small fortune? Answer: Start with a large fortune and open a restaurant.)

    The narrower gap between me and my friend isn't really Reinfeld's fault. My friend may have been working harder, looking at books better suited to our skill level, practicing his tactics more diligently, and certainly playing stronger opposition than I was. Chess improvement - like improvement in many fields - benefits from exertion and feedback. There is good advice and good chess content in CCC, but it was too easy for me as a youngster to enjoy the book as a passive reader.

    So my advice to a novice considering the book - or any book for novices - is to go through it once and then either give it away or put it on the shelf for at least a year. A beginner's book is useful to get a novice started, to offer the bare rudiments, but most improvement is going to come from playing, getting some feedback, doing tactics, and seeing what good chess looks like. Ultimately though, very few people learn to play decent chess from a book, so treat CCC (or any other book of that ilk) like the user's manual for your TV rather than a Bible.

    For more on the book, there's a PDF excerpt here.

    Thursday
    Nov122015

    Book Notice: Polgar's *A World Champion's Guide to Chess*

    Susan Polgar and Paul Truong, A World Champion's Guide to Chess: Step-by-Step Instructions for Winning Chess the Polgar Way! Russell Enterprises, 2015. 384 pp. $19.95.

    I'll start with two grumpy old guy "get off my lawn!" critiques. First, there is simply no need for any more beginner's books. If you've found one you like, then get that one for the young novices in your life when they want to pick up the game. Second, the book's covers are loaded with entirely unnecessary self-promotion. One need not be a grandmaster, a world champion (the front cover implies that this is in the present tense, but her reign ended in 1999), or an "Internationally Acclaimed Chess Trainer!" to write a book for beginners.

    With that out of the way, and remembering the adage about not judging a book by its cover (or by the first part of the introduction), let me say that it's a very good first book for beginners, particularly for young children. If you don't have a first chess book in mind to give the young novices in your life, you could certainly do worse than this one.

    The first part consists of four tutorials covering all the rules of chess, including the different ways a game can be drawn, and concludes with a short primer on chess notation.

    The next part, "Section I", consists of 18 chapters. The first, "Checkmate in One Move with Each of the Pieces", gives the student 100 positions to solve - you can see the influence of her father here (cf. his massive Chess: 5334 Problems, Combinations and Games), and that's essentially the pattern you'll see through the rest of the book. Polgar clearly subscribes to the medieval saying that repetition is the mother of learning, and since I'm a fellow subscriber I'm along for the ride. The next 17 chapters include traditional topics like forks, pins, skewers, discovered attacks, double check and so on, but there are also some slightly non-traditional topics like underpromotion and defending by check or pin.

    Section II has one chapter, "32 Key Endgame Positions". It includes the elementary mates, opposition and some other king and pawn endgame basics, the bishop and wrong rook's pawn (or rook's pawn and wrong bishop, if you prefer), Philidor's Position and the Lucena Position in rook endings, and so on.

    Section III again returns to the Laszlo Polgar modus operandi: 50 mates in one move followed by 50 mates in two moves and 20 mates in three moves.

    Section IV has two chapters: "Some Dos and Don'ts [sic] of Chess Strategy" and "Two Instructive Games" (Polgar wins against Bent Larsen and Simen Agdestein).

    Finally, there are a pair of appendices. The first, "Tips, Etiquette, and Helpful Advice for Tournament Players" is very good, especially for kids, who are clearly the intended audience. (It would seem that these tips were written many years ago, however, as the penultimate bit of advice is amusingly archaic: "Please do not listen to a Walkman while you are playing. This distracts both you and your opponent." I guess I shouldn't bring my 8-track tape player either, consarn it!) The second appendix is excellent too, "Advice for Parents and Coaches".

    All in all, a good, solid beginner's book.