Customer Reviews

Common Sense in Chess

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Here in this book are the essentials of mastering chess play. Lasker divides his book in the principles of opening play, attack, defense and endgame play with illustrated games to show how strategic principles are to be used. This book is not large but it is very complete. The principles are easy to understand and apply. There power is developed through higher and higher levels of practice. It is believed that there have only been five geniuses in chess, Emanuel Lasker, Capablanca, Morphy, Bobby Fisher and Alexander Alkehine. One can do no better than studying the brilliant games of these masters and their writings but I particulary recommend the works of Emanuel Lasker. His manuevering and techniques are very subtle but very powerful. Common Sense in chess is one of his better books and is an excellent course for those who know how to play the game. It is not a beginners course, but if you know the elements of the game, a thourough study and playing through the games can lead to chess mastery.

In this book Lasker offers the novice many valuable hints which will improve his game rapidly. The book deals with each part of the game with the aid of general principles.

If you are an experienced or already an strong player you won't benefit from this book. Chances are that you will find the book too basic or obvious, but if you are a newcomer to the world of chess you have something to win from reading and studying this book.

The book is wrote in an clear and conversational way, such as the one of a lecturer. Any novice will find expositions of the basic problems common to every game of chess.

Here in this book are the essentials of mastering chess play. Lasker divides his book in the principles of opening play, attack, defense and endgame play with illustrated games to show how strategic principles are to be used. This book is not large but it is very complete. The principles are easy to understand and apply. There power is developed through higher and higher levels of practice. It is believed that there have only been five geniuses in chess, Emanuel Lasker, Capablanca, Morphy, Bobby Fisher and Alexander Alkehine. One can do no better than studying the brilliant games of these masters and their writings but I particulary recommend the works of Emanuel Lasker. His manuevering and techniques are very subtle but very powerful. Common Sense in chess is one of his better books and is an excellent course for those who know how to play the game. It is not a beginners course, but if you know the elements of the game, a thourough study and playing through the games can lead to chess mastery.

this is a good book to start with after u get familiar with the
basic rules of chess like how to move pieces castle and all that stuff. this is like a primer for beginners
if u have played well over some 100 games to 200 games u may need it no promise there but if u have played well over 500 games think twice or thrice because it is quite basic well can handle the rest

This was a disappointing buy to me. Common sense is a large topic and this book didn't give me what I was expecting from it.
The matters are treated in a too slim way, and games analysis are from openings we usually do not see any more. A large subject but a small treatment. But maybe I just didn't understand it?

Dr. Lasker was a great world champion in his time, but that doesn't say that he was a good teacher as well (Dr. Tarrash on the other hand, wasn't a world champion, but he was a great tutor). Lasker's "Common sense in Chess" suffers from a serious weaknesses. The first one is Lasker's type of player. He was a "practical" player more than a theory creator. That helped him, I guess, to keep the title for more than 20 years, but didn't help him to explain in this book the thoughts behind the ideas, to show us how to observe complicated positions, and to understand the game better, like Tarrash did. Second weakness of the book is its age: It was written in 1895. Being an old book doesn't mean that it must be a bad one, but in this case it does. Short time after the book was released, theory revolution started by the "hyper modern" masters - Nimzovich, Reti, Alekhine, Breyer etc. Reti, in his classic "Modern ideas in Chess", demonstrates very well how the old Steinitz school masters, including Lasker, failed to understand the new ideas of the young masters. This revolution, that is represented well by Nimzovich and Reti, and is agreed to be the basic foundation of the modern Chess, is not in this book. So besides a limited historical value, this book had lost its importance years ago, unlike "My system", for example.