Would You Recommend How to Reassess Your Chess by Silman?

Would you recommend the book How to Reassess Your Chess by Jeremy Silman? What USCF rating level do you think it would be most helpful for? Is there another book you would recommend reading instead? Thanks!

Revolutionise your Chess  by Viktor Moskalenko. Silman's book also highly recommended.

Simple Chess, by Michael Stean

Judgment and Planning in Chess, by Max Euwe

Planning in Chess, by Janos Flesch

Chess Middlegame Planning, by Peter Romanovsky

@aidin299 - Yes it is a book that breaks many sterio-typed ideas.

Anyway, good reading and enjoy !

I am about 1200 and I just started reading the book. So far I find it very useful... In my blog the story about why I picked this book...

http://blog.chess.com/stef80/i-have-found-my-book

I haven't read it, so I can't say whether it is appropriate. For 1500-1600 rating it is usually good to work on some game strategy aspects (such as early middlegame planning), so if that book covers similar topics it should be fine, and also:

- Andrew Soltis' "Pawn Structure Chess";

- Andrew Kinsman's "Improve Your Middlegame Play";

- Max Euwe's "Judgement and Planning in Chess" (Andre_Harding recomended it too a few posts earlier);

- Nikolay Yakovlev's "Chess Blueprints - Planning in the Middlegame".

For 1400-1500 rating it's good to work on mistake reduction and move choice abilities. Andrew Soltis' "How to Choose a Chess Move" would be good, and other similar books too.

I would highly recommend not the book, but the how to reassess your chess workbook. I think that's what got me from 1500s to 1700s.

Thanks for the input.

I'd say Amateur's Mind.

At the stage you're in becoming familiar with the "playing vocabulary" of positional play seems the sensible early step.

At least as important is identifying the kinds of common gaffes a player makes, and AM is good for this too.

If you're working hard on your tactics and calculation, then once you've digested AM there are many excellent books that address positional play, Euwe's 2 volume work is one and Pachman's is another always good choice. I've never seen Simple Chess by Stean but everything I've read about it praises it very highly.

I don't know if it makes a difference but mine is the perspective of just an OTBer; correspondence play is nothing I deal with, though I've never seen anything that convinces me that the basis for good CC play is anything other than a great OTB understanding of chess.

Thanks. I'll look it up.

There are so many options.

I would steer away from Moskalenko's book as a 'textbook' - that said I have spent a lot of time with it, and some of the Chapters are very good, and its fun.

Silman's book is very good - and there aren't many other books that cover so many themes at the pace he does.  There isn't much that is original, but the packaging is good.

Kotov's think like a grandmaster is a good choice 

Another tack would be the Yusupov series from quality chess - these really have a lot to be said for them. Just start with the basic ones.  Lots of themese are introduced, but the important thing is that you have to then solve some problems.  In my view the best way to drive the learning through is through practice and not theory. 

Yes, I read it and it really helped me.

Yes.

Not sure if I'd recommend just the workbook since it will be easier if you read either The Amateur's Mind or Reasses first, but the workbook is a great idea. I will combine two suggestions and recommend The Amateur's Mind and the Reassess Your Chess workbook. I think TAM is enough to understand Silman's idea of formulating a plan, which you can use to then work on the workbook. I like Silman's writing, and I believe it helped me out although it's been a long time since I've been through any of his books.

If you get Reasses Your Chess, which is a good choice (although there are other options out there), make sure you get the latest edition since it has some revisions.

I started the book and stopped to read Amateur's mind first after hearing many say to start with Amateurs.  I completed it this summer and expect to read the rest of Reassess in the future along with the workbook which both are waiting on my shelf. I feel I absorbed a lot this summer and now I am in the process of just playing and applying most of what I learned. 

+1  Simple Chess

I just bought The Amateur's Mind. It's on it's way. I'll keep the other suggestions in mind in case I actually enjoy reading my first chess book.  Thanks, everyone.

With my post I was kind of hinting at what thor_ras said, though I decided not to put it so bluntly :-)

As an American chessplayer, it pains me to see so many of my countrymen buy dumbed-down chess books. That's what I think of Silman's books: they are not bad chess books, but I feel they are dumbed-down repackagings of The Classic Chess Literature. I cringe whenever I see someone rave about the Silman endgame book: it's an okay book, sure, but there are SO MANY books far superior to it! The same goes with Reassess.

The thing is, I don't entirely blame Silman for this! He knows that most US chessplayers are lazy sacks of s--- and don't want to study real chess. Hence the reason his books sell so well year after year.

About some other books recommended in this thread:

I studied Modern Chess Strategy by Pachman. It's not my favorite, but it is a good book, especially if you play the Queen's Gambit Declined or Grunfeld from either side.

My System is very tough: I recently saw an interview of 2800+ Levon Aronian (I think on the excellent ChessInTranslation.com) who said that Nimzowitsch's book was very helpful to him...when he was an IM! The book is very worthwhile, but as a 2000+ player, it is a lot for me to digest (it's one of the books I'm reading now).

The Euwe series is reputed to be excellent!

The truth is: if you want to improve your chess with book study, read the Soviet School-approved classics. Fill your library with them. Once in awhile, a western author comes out with a good middlegame textbook...but not very often.

Another thing is, a lot of people have a phobia about Descriptive Notation. If you are serious about improving, you need to get over it.