Off the Wall Chess - My Favorite Chess Books
Submitted by
billwall on Sun, 04/06/2008 at 2:07pm.
Perhaps my favorite chess book is Irving Chernev's The 1000 Best Short Games of Chess. It was my second chess book. My first, which I found in a used book store in June, 1969, was Reuben Fine's Practical Chess Openings, written in the 1940s.
I found Chernev's book in a book store in Tacoma, Washington and paid
$2.95 for it. I studied it and played over all 1000 games at one time or
another. I own two copies of the book. One is completely used, marked up, loose pages, etc. The other is in fairly good shape.
My next two chess books were I.A. Horowitz's Chess Openings, Theory and Practice and Korn and Evans, Modern Chess Openings, 10th edition. I have MCO 6, 10, 11, 13, and 14, but the 10th seems to be my favorite.
All of these books were purchased in the summer of 1969. These books helped me with openings and chess and traps. A few months later, I played in the American Open in Santa Monica and my first rating was 1522 after studying these chess books for a few months.
By early 1970, I bought My 60 Memorable Games by Bobby Fischer. It was very good for explaining Fischer's best games and deep in annotations. I don't think I appreciated the annoations until years later.
In 1971, I bought Reuben Fine's Basic Chess Endings, and tried to play
over all the endings in the book. I made 3 by 5 notecards with endings on them and the solution. But I don't think I absorbed the endings very well.
I seldom had an equal and tough endgame that could have been found in the book. I still enjoyed openings.
By 1972 I was buying all the Chess Informants (I have volumes 1 through
55 before I quit buying them, which I later regret). I also got My System by Nimzovich, but found it a little hard to read and study.
Throughout the 1970s, I bought and read chess books that covered openngs that I played, such as opening books in the French, Sicilian, Ruy Lopez, and unusual openings.
When the Encyclopedia of Chess Openings started appearing in 5 volumes, I purchased all of them. I also got books like A History of Chess by Murray and Golembek's Encyclopedia of Chess.
By the 1980s, I probably had over 100 chess books. I enjoyed game
collections for players such as Botvinnik, Fischer, Karpov, Spassky, Alekhine, Capablanca, and others.
By 1982, I wrote my first chess book, 300 King's Gambit Miniatures.
All totaled, I wrote 29 chess books on a variety of openings.
I now own over 1,500 chess books and some of my very favorites include
The Oxford Companion of Chess by Hooper and Whyld, Oxford Encyclopedia of Chess Games by Levy and O'Connell, My Great Predecessors (5 volumes) by Kasparov. Chess by Polgar, Pal Benko - My Games and Compositions, Amos Burn by Forster, Alekhine's Chess Games by Skinner and Verhoeven, any of Edward Winter's chess books, Reuben Fine by Woodger, Chess World Championships by Gelo, Profile of a Prodigy by Brady, The Bobby Fischer I Knew by Denker (signed copy), Chess is My Life by Karpov (signed), Samuel Reshevsky by Gordon, The Immortal Game by Shenk, Chess for Success by Ashley, and The Sorcerer's Apprentice by Bronstein.
I don't buy many chess books like I used to. I have more than enough
to study, no room for any more books, and I get most of my chess information from databases and online. One can now store all these books and all these games on a small 4 GB thumbdrive, and still have room left over.