Book Review: Weapons of Chess, Bruce Pandolfini
So you’ve been listening to the advice of folks here. You’ve learned opening principles and you’ve been doing puzzles and learning tactics. You’re at the point where you aren’t hanging pieces anymore and you’ve had some games where you’ve successfully executed a few tactics of your own.
But, still, there are too many times when you’re just staring at the board wondering: what do I do now? The plain fact of the matter is that very often your position just doesn’t have any tactics in it. You may have gone over some GM-level games, or read some annotations of such games – but you’re completely lost because you don’t see what they are seeing and you don’t even understand all the lingo: bad bishops, weak squares, outposts, IQP’s, minority attacks, and backward pawns. What are they talking about? How does one assimilate that information and how does it help?
The next step in your chess learning is strategy. The problem, however, is that there are an overwhelming number of strategy books that are well over the head of a 1400 player (many are well over the head of a 1600 player, too).
(By the way: one should also study endgames, and with the right book, they can be studied at *any* level. That will be the subject of another review)
RussBell has some great blogs on resources for beginners and beyond. In https://www.chess.com/blog/RussBell/good-chess-books-for-beginners-and-beyond he recommends the following sequence for strategy books:
- Play Winning Chess, Sierawan
- Weapons of Chess, Pandolfini
- Winning Chess Strategies, Sierawan (or Back to Basics: Strategy, Valeri Beim; or Elements of Positional Evaluation: How the Pieces Get Their Power, Dan Heisman.)
Enter Weapons of Chess, by Bruce Pandolfini. Pandolfini might be the most famous chess coach today, in large part because he was the chess consultant on both of the two best chess productions in the past few decades: Searching for Bobby Fischer and the Netflix series Queen’s Gambit (he was also the consultant on the book upon it was based); and because he is a prolific author (Wikipedia lists 35 books in his bio, and he has a monthly column in Chess Life). He can count super-GM Fabiano Caruana as one of his students.
Cutting to the chase: Weapons is a great book for those just wading into strategy. He briefly covers 38 strategy topics, averaging about seven to eight pages per topic -- ranging from three pages on "Bishops of Opposite Color" to 60 pages on four sections of "Isolated d-pawns"). Many of the topics will be new to those who have only learned opening principles and tactics. He explains all them simply and clearly, with lots of diagrams and without lists of moves to be played (so one doesn’t need a chessboard to follow his explanations, as one would for both of Sierawan’s books in the list above – and for every other chess book I’ve ever seen). Each section has a short summary of the key points at the end. The sections are not dependent upon another, and so they are presented in alphabetical order. A benefit of this organization is that it can be a handy reference book for basic strategies and basic positional understandings.
As I haven’t read Seirawan’s Play Winning Chess, I can’t offer an opinion of whether one needs to, or would benefit from, reading that first. But I can tell you that Weapons works terrifically as an introductory strategy book – or, at least it did for me.
In short: I wholeheartedly agree with RussBell that this is a must-read book for anyone in the 1100’s to 1300’s looking to elevate their game.
(Plug: this is an update of a review I posted at a relatively recently created club I'm helping to organize: The Bookworm Club).
Bruce Pandolfini, Weapons of Chess, 1989, paperback, 288pp, Amazon Link
