Chess books you can't live without?!
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I'm going to have to echo some of the previous posters. Winning Chess Tactics, How to Reassess Your Chess, and I'll add Silman's Complete Endgame Course(which I recently bought) are outstanding. What do these books have in common? Yasser Seirawan and Jeremy Silman. The tactics book is great for beginners and the other books are useful for beginners and club players alike.
The 2 voulmes of Mastering the Chess Openings by Watson are good also Fischers My 60 Best games. Nimzovitch My System is a great book, it may take some work to get through it but it is well worth the time . One more book i think is great is Pal Benkos Chess Endgame Lessons.
Art of attack
Think like a grandmaster
My system
Openings explained for White/Black (Dzindzi)
The Jeremey Silman books.(Theres a few: so i mean all of them :)
Of course, im still a believer in a good old hard copy of NCO despite having software such as chessbase, fritz etc.
Seirawan's Winning Chess Tactics was probably the most important book that I read, though that was back serveral years ago as I was just getting back into playing. The most important book I haven't read is de la Maza's Rapid Chess Improvement. It seems like the basic ideas are so easily summed up that it seems like a waste of time and money to actually read it. From the reviews I've read it sounds like the bulk of the book is devoted to hyping the simple method and the CT Art software. If somebody did read it and thinks otherwise though I'd be happy to hear their point of view.
If you're under say USCF 2100, find yourself some good tactics books, as this should consume most of your study time. And among the best in terms of quality and number of puzzles would be the Manual of Chess Combinations series, Tactical Targets in Chess (both volumes), Anthology of Chess Combinations, and Sharpen Your Tactics. For the endgame, I would start with Chess Endings, then Essential Chess Endings, and ultimately the Endgame Manual. For a lot of endgame puzzles try Endgame Challenge. For defense, I'd look at Chess Cafe's Puzzle Book 3 and Heisman's Looking for Trouble. This should at least get you started. Of course there's any number of good chess books out there, but these are all very solid. Hope this helps and good luck reaching your chess goals.
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