Product Description

Winner of the year 2000 Chess Journalists of America Cramer Award for Best Chess Book.

'How can I improve my game?' is a perennial question facing chess-players. While there are no easy answers, Grandmaster Alex Yermolinsky is better qualified than most to offer advice. Having found the famed 'Soviet School of Chess' wanting, he trained himself, slowly but surely raising his game to top-class grandmaster standard. In this book he passes on many of the insights he has gained over the years, steering the reader away from 'quick-fix' approaches and focusing on the critical areas of chess understanding and over-the-board decision-making.

Topics covered include: trend-breaking tools; the burden of small advantages; what exchanges are for; classics revisited; and computer chess. A large part of the book discusses a variety of important opening set-ups, including methods for opposing offbeat but dangerous lines, such as the Grand Prix Attack.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #267322 in Books
• Published on: 1999-12-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

From the Publisher
Gambit Publications specializes in chess and has an unrivalled reputation for originality and editorial excellence. The company is owned and staffed entirely by leading chess masters and grandmasters.

About the Author
Alex Yermolinsky is one of the strongest players in the United States. He was US Champion in 1996, and won the US Open Championship in 1995 and 1997. He has represented the USA in four Olympiads, and played board 2 for the team that won the World Team Championship in 1993.

Customer Reviews

This book will improve your chess
I've just re-read this book after reading the recently-released 'Chess for Zebras' by Jonathan Rowson (Gambit Publications) and I have been struck by their complementary nature. Rowson, like Yermolinsky, deals with how difficult it is to improve as an adult player, and explores the psychology of chess-playing. But while Rowson is an academic, with a somewhat detached and scientific attitude to the problem, Yermolinsky is much more down-to-earth. And yet, both are basically saying the same thing - to improve, you must play, you must learn to calculate, and you must subject your own games to rigorous analysis to find out what you do wrong. Both have applied this approach to their own chess, and have continued to make progress well beyond the age when most of us find our ratings have been written in stone.

I may be doing Rowson a disservice here, but it seems to me that although he recognises the effect of emotion on his chess, he seeks to eliminate it. Yermolinsky, on the other hand, seeks to use it - to feed off his own passions and to exploit the weaknesses of the human across the board. Since I can't imagine how I could stop being emotional at the chess-board, Yermolinsky's approach has a certain appeal! In a highly illuminating portion of this book, he explains the idea of 'trends' in a game - from good position to bad, from attacking position to defending. The way you feel about a position may depend on how you reached it, and your psychological state at that point might work for or against you. If a demoralised opponent realises you're dithering in your attack and don't know what to do, he may take heart again and defend resourcefully. Yermolinsky shows you how trends can be identified, and gives advice on how to reverse a trend which is not going your way.

What you won't find (in either of these books) are shortcuts to success. These guys put in the work, and improved, and they believe the rest of us can do it too with a bit of a push. I'd almost put this book on the 'modern psychology' shelves in a bookshop - it's certainly not an instant-soup-type solution to daily woes, but it is an equivalent to sound cognitive-therapy-type books that aim to improve your confidence and happiness. This one improves your chess, which in my opinion means a lot more confidence and happiness!

fantastic book for advanced players
I felt compelled to write a review after just having finished reading this book. This is simply the best chess book (among the 60 or more books) that I've read. The first chapter on 'trends and turning points' is something new to me. Yermolinsky shows how you should play when the trend of play favours or is against you. I now know that I must increase the speed of play after a blunder from my opponent, when he's down. He also shows how a player should develop a proper opening repertoire. He recommends that you play mainline openings that suit your temperament and style (very important!), and advises against quick-fix lines like the Grand Prix Attack against the Sicilian, which I have used at one time or another, along with a hotch-potch of other sidelines. The book also shows that, like Yermo at an earlier stage of his career, my 'tactical' understanding was not up to scratch compared to my positional understanding. There are countless other tips on how to improve your game. So if you're rated 1800 or higher, and your progress have been stagnating (like me, a 2100-rated player), this is the book for you. I would have given it 10 stars if it were possible.

a pragmatic approach to chess
Highly recommandable. Yermolinsky teaches chess directly from the grandmaster laboratory. Again and again he stresses that one has to be critical about general rules and that there is no easy way to improve your chess. This book gives an amazing insight in modern chess.