@tpr If you want to be a real GM, like make a living from chess, you should study much more than play. There are many GMs nowadays who could be better but they do not train enough, because they mostly play that silly bullet games and travel between competitions. It was the other way round at the time of old masters. They played a little but practiced a lot.
The best ones I read when I was a begginer were Xadrez Básico, a Brazilian book which title means "Basic Chess", and Pachman's Modern Chess Strategy. After that I read many, and would recommend Rowson's 7 Deadly Chess Sins, Villa's 100 Endgames you must know, Shreshevsky's Endgame Strategy, Jan Markos's Under the Surface and others. For Training, Woodpecker Method is great.
I've only read one (still kind of new to playing more seriously/regularly) and that's "How To Beat Anyone At Chess" by I thiiink Ethan Moore was the author's name. It's basic but had solid info for a fairly new player (well, I mean, I've known the basic, how-the-pieces-move rules since I was a kid but never played too regularly until the past month or so).
My favorite Tactics book is Great Book of Chess Combination by Joscef Pinter. I find the presentation of the Tactics to my likings. The solution is below each diagram. ECC and other books put the solutions at the end of the book.
Among Strategy books, I recommend Chess Secrets: Giants of Strategy by Neil McDonald.
3/4.
Some book by Luděk Pachman. I forgot the title.
«Das Schachspiel» by Siegbert Tarrasch.
This was about more than 40 years ago and didn’t help very much.
«Zoom 001 Zero Hour for Operative Chess Opening Models» by Bent Larson.
I typesetted some of the games of the latter with LaTeX etc.
One diagram for every move. As black as well as white.
The book is about KID ideas. Hard stuff. And it is more a great game Sammlung.
Recently I bought some Ebooks by John Nunn.
Puzzles and various endgame studies.
Great stuff.
From time to time i try to solve one of the problems from there.
I jumped to the conclusion that learning chess is very similar to learning jazz:
It can’t be learned only by books.
It needs to be played.
#31
Advice on books is no advice to become a GM: most will not at all. The advice is for the regular players like the original poster and all other posters in this thread. If 20 books are enough to become a grandmaster, then the normal player should not exceed 20 books either.
#36
This 20 books is only an example number. I do not not take it as a proof of anything because we are not like machines. Everybody learns in a dfiierent way and with different speed. We might as well be talking how many books Kasparov needed to read become a GM or a world champion.
#37
He lists 20 and he made grandmaster. He lists neither 10 nor 50.
My point is that many of the untitled players overdo on the number of books they buy, read or study.
Buying alone does not help, superficially reading does not help either. You have to patiently study a chess book and maybe revisit it a few years later. Binge reading is useless. So carefully select your chess books. Several strong grandmasters comment that they only had a few chess books, mostly because they could not afford to buy these. So the scarcity of chess books did not hinder them to become a strong grandmaster.
By the way, chess opening books get obsolete fast - and recommended lines always have to be engine-checked.
I am reading a book by Cyrus Lackdawala at the moment - he recommended a line as good for black - but it didn't look so good
to me.
The book is only one year old - yet the engine is showing me a much better final move than the one Lackdawala recommends.
His line is producing a bad evaluation - the new move is producing a good evaluation for black.
Probably a small improvement in Stockfish made the difference.
