Customer Reviews

My System: The Chess Player's strategic bible (Hardinge Simpole Chess Classics)

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I would advise anyone who is serious about chess playing to read this book. It makes a science of the game, as opposed to moving pieces without purpose. It provides the chess player with a plan, a strategy, a method, so that one is not just "pushing wood". There have been many, many chess books written by Reinfeld, Chernov, Horowitz, Pandolfini and others, but Nimzovitch is classic.

In this book he covers:

The importance of controlling the "center"
"Open" files
The importance of the 7th and 8th rank
The passed pawn
How and when to exchange pieces
End game strategy
The "pin"
"Discovery" check
The "pawn "chain"
"positional" play
Doubled pawns
The "isolated" queen pawn
The "two" bishops
Over-protection
Exploiting enemy weakness

If you want your chess game to be taken to a level of meaningful planning and purpose, then this book will help you. Be warned, it is not light reading though. You will have to master chess notation which might take a while. Though Nimzovitch is brilliant and clever, this is a course of STUDY, and as such it takes some work to reap the benifits. I have been playing chess for over 30 years, and this book has improved my game significantly.

Now I know that I spent much of my chess playing "pushing wood", as opposed to planning with purpose.

No book has exerted a greater impact on chess thought over the past 80 years. Variations may come and go, but Nimzowitsch was a seeker after eternal truths and the precepts outlined in this strategic manual have withstood the ravages of time. Breakthroughs in understanding often follow breakthroughs in verbal formulation - Nimzowitsch's skill at translating chess board operations into words was one of the secrets both of his personal success and of the longevity of his system.
Aron Nimzowitsch - grandmaster and strategic innovator - is one of the defining voices of modern chess. his classic books My System and Chess Praxis are immortal classics which taught and inspired generations of grandmasters and champions, such as Petrosian, Larsen, Karpov and Leko. As a player, Nimzowitsch won the important tournaments at Dresden 1926 and Carlsbad 1929, which made him a potential candidate for the world championship. His strategic formulations such as "first restrain, then blockade, finally destroy", "the mysterious rook move" and "the passed pawn's lust to expand" have passed into the very currency and lifeblood of chess usage.