Chess Books - Best order to read for beginners?

Hello there,

First time poster here, and looking for some advice.

I’ve known how to play chess since a young age, and I dabbled on this site for a short time ages ago, then didn’t play a game in about 10 years. However, I’ve just recently gotten back into chess, and have decided to start playing a bit more seriously (all my previous games before were purely casual games against friends and family).

Beyond knowing the rules, and understanding very basic concepts and tactics like opening/middlegame/endgame, forks and pins, developing pieces etc, I’m essentially a complete beginner.

The main points of this post are, firstly, I was just given a big load of chess books by a family member who acquired them from someone else years ago (he doesn’t play chess so he gave them to me. It’s partly what spurred me back into wanting to play again). But I’m at a loss as to which order in which to read them?

These books are:

- The Inproving Chess Thinker, Dan Heissman
- The Mammoth Book of Chess, Graham Burgess
- The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Chess, Patrick Wolff
- Modern Chess Openings, Nick de Firmian
- How to Reassess Your Chess, Jeremy Silman
- My System, Aron Nimzowitsch
- Logical Chess, Irving Chernev
- Grandmaster Preparation, Lyev Polugayevsky
- Chess Fundamentals, Jose Capablanca
- Excelling at Chess Vol. 1, Jacob Aagard,
- Excelling at Chess Vol. 2, Jacob Aagard,
- Play Winning Chess (complete series of the 6 books), Yasser Seirawan

Also, what else should I be doing (other than playing games) to improve? Any YouTube channels that are particularly good for beginners etc?

Sorry for the long post, and thanks in advance guys!

The Complete Idiot's Guide is actually a very decent beginner's book and Patrick Wolff is the author of many of the tactics courses here on chess.com.  Logical Chess is a trifle dated, but it doesn't matter at your level; get out a board and follow along and you will improve by leaps and bounds.  Those are what I think you should start with.  Get through those and you should be able to better decide what to tackle next.

 

Of course a lot of folks prefer a digital format and it's hard to beat Diamond membership here as a one stop source for chess information.  The new Lessons are very well done and unlimited tactical training and videos are great if you are serious about improving.

Since I knocked your post out of the Unanswered category, I suppose I should give you my $.02 on the other books.  Dan Heissman has a web site that I'm too lazy to check right now, but I'm pretty sure his The Improving Chess Thinker is an intermediate book.  Haven't looked at the Mammoth Book in years, but I remember it as being well annotated, if just a little intimidating because, well, it's mammoth.  MCO used to be the go to book for openings, but has been largely supplanted by van der Sterrens FCO which has good explanations of the motives behind the openings.  Silman's How to Reassess is actually one of his more advanced books and won't make much sense unless you're already familiar with The Amateur's Mind.  My System is considered a wonderful book by some because it helped so many grandmasters get where they are.  At the risk of inciting the ire of the faithful, I should point out that most teachers consider it inferior to many contemporary books.  

Haven't tried to read any of the others.  Good luck!

Tactics and then more tactics

Some of those books are very advanced. For beginners, The Idiot's Guide and GM Yasser Seirawan's Winning Chess would be best for a beginner. Winning Chess openings by Yasser Seirawan would also  be good to read. After that, I'd go with Tactics and Endings by Yasser.

The other books are more for intermediate to advanced players. For instance, How to Reassess Your Chess by Jeremy Silman is for someone with at least a few years of playing experience.

Start with the basics, the fundamentals and build from there. Good luck!

Why not start with "Alpha Teach Yourself Chess in 24 hours". By Zsuzsa Polgar, Hoainhan "Paul" Truong and Leslie Alan Horowitz. I'm reading it now, looks to be a great book so far!

While that sounds like a good book (never read it), I don't think that book is one on his list . . .

                   

Good Chess Books for Beginners and Beyond...

https://www.chess.com/blog/RussBell/good-chess-books-for-beginners-and-beyond

For first books targeted to beginner/novice players I recommend to start with "Pandolfini's Ultimate Guide to Chess" by Bruce Pandolfini, followed by "The Complete Idiot's Guide To Chess" by Patrick Wolff.  For instructive game collections start with "A First Book of Morphy" by Frisco Del Rosario, followed by "Logical Chess Move By Move" by Irving Chernev.  

Of the books in the list posted by the OP, for the beginner/novice player, Yasser Seirawan's instructive 'Winning' series is excellent.

Check out John Bartholomew's YouTube Channel...

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6hOVYvNn79Sl1Fc1vx2mYA

Check out Chessable.com

and Chessable's YouTube Channel....

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=chessable

My guess is that those would be the ones to start with, but I also think that it is a mistake to worry too much about order for a bunch of books that you already own. Just go with whatever you are comfortable with at the time. Some of those books are pretty advanced, but you can discover that for yourself by looking at a few pages. By the way, there are seven books in the Seirawan series:
http://seagaard.dk/review/eng/bo_beginner/ev_winning_chess.asp?KATID=BO&ID=BO-Beginner
http://www.nystar.com/tamarkin/review1.htm
https://web.archive.org/web/20140627132508/http://www.chesscafe.com/text/hansen173.pdf
https://www.chess.com/article/view/book-review-winning-chess-endings
https://web.archive.org/web/20140708092617/http://www.chesscafe.com/text/review560.pdf

John Bartholomews chess fundamentals YouTube series is a good place to start. When playing games I recommend that you play games where you have at least 30 minutes to make all of your moves, preferably with some sort of increment. If that seems like too long 15+10 is a good time control to find games easily, have at least some time to think and get a lot of games under your belt quickly. Nothing beats playing in terms of learning.

On top of that try to do as many tactics training exercises as you can. Playing long games, training tactics and couple beginner video tutorials (like John Bartholomews chess fundamentals) should get you going and on road to improvement much faster than any chess book ever would. Once you get a grasp of the basics like developing harmoniously without wasting time, don't hang pieces left and right, capture undefended pieces and have the ability to see the simple 1-2 move tactics (including basic 1-2 move checkmates), you are better prepared to start studying beginner books.

I’m not sure if John Bartholomew’s chess Fundamentals is better than any chess book below a certain rating. I see your rating is in fact below 900 so he may of hit the nail on the head. However I’m not sure if tactics trainer is the best fit for you, maybe go over Books like Bobby Fischer teaches chess first. I looked at your book list and it’s lacking a good tactics book. For chess players, tactics are like your multiplication tables. You memorize as many as you can before you progress to higher stuff. You have a lot of tactics to learn. Bobby Fischer teaches teach would be a good start, and maybe later you could do another book Dan Heisman recommends, it’s a book by a man named Baines I think, but I forget the name of the book. For light chess reading you can try and get a hold of dan Heisman’s novice nook column. It’s still up, but you have to donate to chess cafe in order to read them. That’s one of the things an old chess coach tells his students to do, read talky chess columns or articles. If you can look at his column for solving tactics, you’ll learn a lot.

According to Dan Heisman, there are 5 fundamental chess skills every chess player needs to get really good at before reaching expert level, and the way you get better at them is playing 2 hour games, where you find all the replies to your candidate moves before you make them. As you might see this could take a long time, and that is why you have two hours to think. Training yourself to consider all the replies to each of your candidate moves and figuring out which one to take after considering your choices is a skill that most chess players who only play blitz will never have. I advise you to don’t do what I did , which was play a lot of blitz early on, but chose the better route, and play games with 2 hour time controls.

From your profile you play exclusively blitz games. Try to play mostly longer time controls, including "daily" chess, so you have time to think about what you should be doing - speed chess may be fun, but at this stage of your development it will do little to promote your rapid improvement or your understanding of how to play correctly.

It makes sense that taking time to think about what you should be doing would promote improvement in your chess skills.

This is not to suggest that you should necessarily play exclusively slow time controls or daily games, but they should be the greater percentage of your games, much more so than speed games (rapid, bullet, blitz, etc.) which do almost nothing to promote an understanding of how to play the game well. Speed chess tends to be primarily an exercise in moving pieces around faster than your opponent while avoiding checkmate, in hopes that his/her clock runs out sooner than yours.

Here's what IM Jeremy Silman has to say on the topic...
https://www.chess.com/article/view/longer-time-controls-are-more-instructive

And the experience of a FIDE Master...
https://www.chess.com/forum/view/general/how-blitz-and-bullet-rotted-my-brain-don-t-let-it-rot-yours

Great recommendations!

Hi! Your selections is a little bit big, I would suggest to shorten it, and trying not to focus that much on openings, we can learn that with model games at this stage. I would recommend almost all books regarding or written by classics (Capablanca, Alekhine, Nimzovich), others which are more modern authors (Jeremy Silman, Agaard, Rowson, Cyrus Lakdawala, and others). As a general tip, the names that look very forced to sell the book...usually are (not always, e.g. Chess for Zebras by Rowson, excellent book, dont know if such a good name but perfect content). Feel free to write me for any question that might arrive, this is in general terms what I suggest to my students.

That's a really great collection you've been given tbf.

 

Not familiar with them all, but Seirewan's "play winning chess" is a primer for the rest of his series, and really good for starting out. Can't really go wrong with that.

Chess for Zebras, Rowson: "aspiring players should place much more emphasis on developing their skill than increasing their knowledge. This means that chess work should be less focused on 'learning', and more about 'training' and 'practicing' whereby you force yourself to think."

 

And, of course, Silman and Heisman are gurus for us improvers who are not child prodigies.

"HOW TO REASSESS YOUR CHESS".

suggest daily games, the puzzles (!) & lessons here, as well as silman's "complete endgame course". 🙂