Review of www.eudesign.com/chessops

Although this is ostensibly a book reviews blog this author is taking the liberty of reviewing a couple of websites he has found very useful for improving his game.

I first found this website after repeatedly losing to my friend at chess. Since he was very rude about the way I played I decided to look for “chess opening moves” through Google and this is what I found.

This site is completely free and there are not even any annoying adverts. The look of it is cheap and cheerful but as an introductory guide to the openings it is absolutely brilliant. It is a site that I keep looking back at even now as it is constantly being updated, and I need to keep refreshing my knowledge of the openings I play OTB.

The main problem with this site is that as my knowledge has expanded I have come to realise that it does not cover all of the variations in many openings, and that its evaluation of a few positions is a bit suspect. Any move that you click on that is not in the database automatically comes up as a bad move (“You can do better than that! Try another move!” it says), even when they are good. Also the descriptions of the strategies behind the openings are too brief to either illuminate the novice or to fill out the understanding of an intermediate player.

That said this free site is terribly useful and is the perfect complement to playing chess, particularly if one is playing chess and losing a lot.

Irving Chernev’s Logical Chess: Move by Move

My name is Simon Hayward and this is my first review for the blog. I am writing from the perspective of someone who has learned to play chess properly only recently, and having learned some basic tactical themes and some openings now wishes to improve their game to the standard of serious club play.

Reading annotated games is an excellent way to improve your play but I find that often annotations concentrate just on the novelties in a game or else lose a novice reader in endless branching variations. Logical Chess is the perfect antidote to this. It gives simple explanations of every move, good or bad, in over thirty master level games. This covers an enormous range of tactical themes, opening theory, positional jockeying, and endgame techniques. I found the games demonstrating how to exploit the weaknesses created by moving pawns in front of the castled king particularly enjoyable and instructive.

There are a couple of minor flaws with the book, but they should not put you off studying it. The first is that sometimes Chernev does labour his points; while his wit and erudition does carry the reader through slightly repetitious opening annotations they do eventually get to be annoying. The second is that it concentrates a great deal on variations of the Queen’s Gambit Declined and the Indian Defences to Queen’s Pawn Openings. However since well over half of all tournament games begin with 1.d4 this should not be seen as too serious a flaw.

I would recommend this book overwhelmingly to anyone that wishes to improve beyond the strong beginner stage of chess playing, and wishes to understand why certain moves form the mainline of the openings. It will also improve your endgame technique and positional understanding. A great book.