Winning Chess Strategies (Yasser Seirawan)

I just finished this book. Well, you know how chess books are - I've probably gone through 85% of it variation by variation OTB, eyed the notation for practice on another 10% of it, and briefly skimmed 5% of it. I'll go through it again at some point.

First things first: This is a good book for beginners to start memorizing the squares. It's not written in small notation...the text is large...and the diagrams are easy to see. Simply going through the book and playing moves out OTB with pieces will drastically increase your knowledge of the squares. Depending upon your memory, you very well may have all 64 like the back of your hand by the time you reach the end.

It's a very easy to read and enjoyable book. Yasser's humor is timely and appropriate as is his selection of games to demonstrate different ideas. Everything from pawn structure, assaults on the king, understanding material, static and dynamic advantages, quite a bit of tactical motifs, comprehending how to read and play the board is all covered in depth. It's not too long, but long enough to be quite thorough. Again, especially for someone new to chess books, notation, and the game in general.

I have his books "Winning Chess Endings" and "Winning Chess Brilliancies", too. I haven't even touched Endings but I have gone through a good 50% of Brilliancies. Right now, I'm switching my attention to cover to covering My System and Chess Praxis, alongside my ChessTempo tactical work and ChessMentor studies here on Chess.com. I'll be busy throughout the holiday season, for sure.

I've heard good things the series too. Glad you liked it.

I read winning chess brilliancies. It is a great book.

Winning Chess Strategy is a good book. In fact I read before a claim by an IM that this book what made him an IM(probaly together with tactics and endgame books).

And the kind of book that serves different purposes at different times. You could go through the book starting at 1100 (I did) and review it again at 1400 and since you see the game differently, understand the concepts on a deeper level.

Seirawan is a really good teacher. He knows how to speak to both the amateur and expert alike it seems.

I agree , I have improved a couple hundred rating points and thinking about reading it again. There are things I'm sure I didn't understand at the time.