Too lazy to set up a board and play through the analysis?

OK, perhaps lazy is a bit harsh, but most of us are balancing a desire to improve our game against other demands on our time. One problem with chess books is that it is easy to buy them, but reading them can be hard work, particularly when lengthy analysis is presented. Playing through games is time-consuming enough, but if you play through a variation over the board you then have get back to the main line position start all over again - I am assuming here that like me you are not quite ready to play blindfold yet ;-)

Playing through the game on a PC (if you don't mind on-screen boards) is an improvement,and searching databases for the games from your book can also help, but there are web sites where the games have already been collected for you. One good site is www.chessgames.com , it has a good searchable online database, and many collections. The only slight drawback is that although you can download the games individually for no charge, to download whole collections in PGN format you have to be a 'premium member' which involve paying an - admittedly not unreasonable - annual fee of 25$.

One of my favourite recent finds is http://www.gambitchess.com/index2.htm . There is a great collection of free downloads here containing collections for specific books, so particularly if you have an old title you may well get lucky here. Most of the files are .pgn, but I even found a .cbh (Chessbase/Fritz format) file of a book I am studying, an old copy of 'New Ideas in Chess' by Larry Evans. Someone has even gone to the trouble of typing in the annotation!

So there you go, not a book review as such but hopefully a useful accompaniment.