Customer Reviews

The Chess Teacher

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This was my first chess book, and I'd say it's a good one to be yours. I've read it twice and return to it frequently as a reference, and given a few copies away. However, if you're considering making it your first, I'd consider Seirawan's Winning Chess and the algebraic edition of Capablanca's book as well. Phillips covers nearly every chess idea briefly and adequately, and he gives the reader a sense of some of the heros of nineteenth and twentieth century chess until Fischer. A friend of mine, who is gifted in the first place, improved tremendously after reading this, so that he began beating computers reliably! It won't do that for everyone, of course--it didn't for me! But I did improve immensely while reading it.

This is the book for the person who wants a crash course on the game for a small fee. You get openings, tactics, endgames, and some chess history. I think you get what you pay for in this case.

This book begins at the very beginning, with the rules of chess, and goes all the way up to moderately advanced strategy and tactics for different phases of the game, suggestions for an opening repertoire, and some chess history as well--in little more than 100 pages! It is written in a terse yet lively style, reminiscent of some volumes in the Cambridge Mathematical Textbooks series, in particular the 100-page "A Concise Introduction to the Theory of Numbers" by Alan Baker (another Alan!). Incidentally, Phillips is also a mathematician and number theory fan.

For absolute beginners, the book might appear cryptic because of its brevity. However, if you are a beginner with a talent for strategy/calculation games, or someone already familiar with chess who needs to quickly review the fundamentals, this is one of the best single books to start out with. In any case, the book can be used as an excellent reviewer after one has gone through more wordy primers on the game.

After one learns the basics, one improves by practice and playing over the games of the masters. The book's final section presents several master games for study and nicely ends this wonderfully concise and complete introduction to chess.

It is a pity that the book is out of print.