Customer Reviews

How to Win at Chess (Batsford Chess Library)

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How to Win at Chess is an adequate piece for beginners looking to advance their chess skills. Keene provides many interesting positions throughout the book and displays his aptitude with an abundance of quality explanations of various positions.

The book looses some appeal because in it skips back and forth between very basic instruction and complicated positional scenarios. One is expected to jump from learning something as simple as a fork to suddenly analyzing one of Kasperov's clinching moves in the same chapter. Had Keene better emphasized the process of rising from a basic level to being able to handle the more complex puzzles he provided, this book would have been extremely worthwhile; however, this gap exists and as a result the level of instruction is lacking.

The book has trouble deciding what it is supposed to be; a beginners guide or a study of games played by the greatest GMs in history. The material here would not likely raise anyone's level above a 1500 rating (I am 1700+ as of this writing). However, I was able to read the entire book in an afternoon, so any chess enthusiast who does enjoy examining games may find it moderately worthwhile due to its brevity.