Studing Chess Made Easy (brief review)

I just finished devouring Andy Soltis' Studying Chess Made Easy. It arrived yesterday, I finished it this morning. Here's my capsule review as posted on Goodreads:


A stellar guide to using the information that's out there in a coherent way. The biggest problem with trying to improve your chess game is, after the fundamental basics, there's a whole lot of "now what?" Soltis' book answers that question.

Chapter 1 ("Chess isn't school") introduces and reinforces the idea that how you go about learning chess is rather different than other subjects.

Chapter 2 ("Cultivating your chess sense") gives a methodology on how to make your chess understanding more innate than rote.

Chapter 3 ("The biggest study myth") presents the idea that succeeding at chess isn't determined by how well you think, it's how much you know without thinking. Pattern recognition is key here.

Chapter 4 ("The right way to study an opening") explains how to familiarize yourself with an opening, investigate it deeper, and choose the right books once you've decided on the one you want to learn. Without having to know all the variations to move ten right up front.

Chapter 5 ("Two-and-a-half move chess") explains, and demonstrates how you rarely have to think further ahead than the chapter title indicates. It's evaluating what you see when you think ahead that's the key.

Chapter 6 ("Overcoming endgame phobia") explains how to go about learning endgames. There's a lot fewer of them you need to know cold than you'd think. The rest can be managed by guiding principles.

Chapter 7 ("Learning to live with TMI") confronts the issues involved in selecting moves. So often, all the guiding principles you've learned in the fundamentals come to odd here, with no real set of priorities. This chapter simplifies that thinking process. (Coupling this chapter, alone, with chunks of Heisman's "Guide to Chess Improvement" is probably going to increase your rating 200-300 points, assuming you're sub-1400 right now.)

Chapter 8 ("How to learn more from a master game") explains how to actually benefit from the advice everyone receives: "play through the games of the masters!" A list of good compendiums is offered, and how to use those books is thoroughly covered.

I expect this book will have diminishing returns the higher your rating is above 1700 or so, but for those of us in the lower eschelons, it's a must for cutting through and understanding the great heaping mounds of chess information that's available these days.