Should I still read Jeremy Silman's "The Amateur's Mind"?

I recently acquired some books to improve my positional understanding. I've been reading The Amateur's Mind by IM Jeremy Silman.

So far I love it, but only thing that makes me ache a bit is how the same positions are given to low rated players (1000-1500). I don't mind when it's 1700+, but 1700- players? I do not see a benefit to this, unless I was in the same range player.

I'm almost 2000 rated player and am managing to learn a lot from this book, but should I really read through the games played by the players rated much less than me? I feel like it teaches me on how to teach chess to a new player rather than improve myself.

Would it hurt to skip these parts and just read things more on my level?

Let me in on your thoughts, Thanks!

This book is not for you, you are an advanced player, this book is for beginners like me.

Ive never actually heard of imbalances until I read about it in this book. I think rather than being a beginner book, its a beginner book on positional play, which I am. Although some things do come to me obvious, and some things do feel like a waste. I just wanted to know if there was a significant importance to reading the lower eating players game and thoughts

I totally agree with you.  Play around your  skill level.  This will ensure a lesson to be learned from each game. 

Thanks. I find the content very useful except the lower rated plays. I felt kind of guilty skipping them, thought perhaps there is an underlying reason they exist. Just want to be sure I'm not misinterpreting

I bought The Amateur's Mind because people/online pro articles told me to read it before tackling Silman's How to Reassess Your Chess, 4th Ed. - I read the 1/3 as big 1st edition 2 decades ago.

Skimming through it, I like the paragraph explanation for every move compared to the short "clearly the best move," brief annotations of a lot of master books - even Fischer's 60 Memorable Games.  He writes things like, "This creates a hole (for the opponent's Knight) on d6, but he'll be so busy defending e5 he won't be able to maneuver here."

I like seeing that thinking, but most of the "thinking" is strategic and I was hoping for something that showed me why I make more blunders in 30 min or less timed games than I should and why, when I look over my daily games (1792 rating here after 5 straight wins, 2116 USCF correspondence rating from the pre-strong-home-computer-engine '70's) a 2nd time, I see something that should have been very obvious from the start.

I think two of Dan Heisman's books, A Guide to Chess Improvement - which has a 70 page chapter devoted to "Thought Process," and The World's Most Instructive Amateur Game Book address mistakes in complete and efficient thinking more and I'm just getting started with them.

I grabbed Silman's Reassess by mistake when I knew I had a couple long doctor's office waits - I'm getting rotator cuff surgery in a month - and I went through the first 40 pages seeing almost all the imbalances and solutions to every example problem before reading the text that went with them.

But skimming, it gets more complicated over the next 600+ pages and I also bought a cheap, used-in-new-condition copy of the 432 page Workbook that goes with it at Amazon.com. So that, plus Heisman books are first on my list - in addition to spending time with the Tactics Trainer or tactics books every day.

So I don't think there's a problem with skipping Amateur's Mind - it might be more valuable AFTER I read and study Reassess to see if I've learned from Reassess.

Hi MickinMD, thank you for the insight. I hope your surgery goes well.

I think The Amateur's Mind provides valuable material as well. I'm on the minor piece imbalance chapter, and even knowing the basics, how and when bishop is better than knight and vice versa, there are some deeper strategic concepts that I may or may not have found on the board, but wouldn't quite understand them. My goal is to look at a position, and understand every aspect of it, rather than just feel it out. And reading this book helps me do just that. My only concern was the class E annotation. This seems like teaching how to coach rather than actually improving in chess itself.

don't waste your time reading many books

I don't think that the Amateur's Mind will help you much. I read it about a year and a half ago. I don't think it helped me even a tiny bit, except with my understanding of a very small number of specific things. Besides, reading a chess book is generally passive learning, and if you want to get better, active forms of learning like playing, training, analyzing your own games, etc. will be better most likely. 

You say you are almost 2000. If you refer to OTB I am in the exact same boat. I don't think this book is all that it's made out to be