Customer Reviews

Simple Chess: New Algebraic Edition (Dover Chess)

5 star:		(27)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

[First reviewed October 30, 2005] I have read the reviews and the questions about the "difficulty" of this book. At the outset let me state that I am a USCF "Class A" Player, rated 1875.

Now, about the title of my review. I have read Chess Praxis, My System (Niemzowitsch), The Amateur's Mind, How to Reassess Your Chess, How to Reassess Your Chess Workbook (Silman), Modern Chess Strategy (Pachman), Simple Chess (Emms), The Middlegame in Chess (Kotov and Keres; WAY overrated) and a book I reviewed previously, Bronstein's book on the Zurich International Tourmament of 1953. This last book I had considered the best middlegame book I had ever read (I have not read Pyotr Romanovsky's texts, nor those of Euwe and Kramer).

Stean's book was recommended to me by the editor himself, Fred Wilson, at a chess tournament. I purchased the book and soon realized that Stean has made understanding positional chess much more simple. Yes, Stean presupposes that his reader has some advanced knoweldge (like the ability to win endgames, to conclude a middlegame attack), so I would not recommend this text to a newcomer. However, there are plenty of books that serve this purpose! What seemed lacking to me was a good middlegame text for near-experts like myself who have not been able to make that breakthrough in positional chess.

Therefore, I must disagree with the reviewer who says one may skip this book and buy one of Reinfeld's puzzle books. That is like comparing apples to oranges: it is certainly always important to sharpen tactics, to improve attacking play, defensive play, endgame play, etc. But this book is for improving the positional handling of the strong "Club-Player," positional handling being separate and distinct from other parts of chess (at least as far as traditional study is concerned).

Let me emphasize that I feel this book is a superior course on STATICS (relatively permanent positional features in a chess position). It seems that authors are teaching DYNAMICS much better these days, but friends around my level have more problems exploiting the statics, and that is why I feel this book is incredible. The advanced player has learned of the importance of outposts, open files, color complexes, etc., but Stean's Simple Chess helps one to "get it." It is such a shame (a tragedy?) that Stean did not see fit to write more.

[UPDATE, February 9, 2006] I am reading Stean's magnificent work for the second time, and I would like to say, in addition to what I said above, that I now consider this the greatest chess book I have ever read, on any facet of the game. After finishing this book again, I will read it a third time, but only the prose and will ignore the games--it is in the prose where the genius of this book is found. Almost no page goes by without some eye-opening insight or three, or four. At many junctures, EVERY sentence on a page reveals something that the intermediate to advanced club player likely never thought of, and helps you see the game of chess in a new light. I can't say enough about this work.

By the title you might think this is a book written for beginners. It is not a simple book at all, yet a good one for the non-beginner. It is a book on strategy, looking at things such as various uses of opening files and minority attacks. More positional ideas, where a beginner or even someone just beyond the beginner stage should be looking at books on tactics, chess traps and going over some of the books that have games with each move analyzed.
However, if you are looking at books like "My System" then also consider getting "Simple Chess" just don't be mislead by the title!

For grandmaster Michael Stean, this may have seemed an appropriate title, but for neophytes out there in chess land, this book is decidedly not simple. Instead, I place this in the range of such books as Larry Evans' excellent New Ideas in Chess, but below that of Pachman's equally fine Modern Chess Strategy. Stean uses complex grandmaster games to illustrate the cornerstones of chess technique such as the Minority Attack, Outposts, Weak Pawns, Open Files, Space etc. Each example is accompanied by insightful descriptions and explanations that one cannot help but learn from. One of the measures of a truly good chess book is that it teaches on all levels, ie., that a 1300 player might learn a tremendous amount from a book and then reread the book later as a 1700 player and make a completely new set of discoveries. Reti's Masters of the Chessboard is like that for me, and so, to a lesser extent, is Simple Chess. This is a small book at 120-some pages, easily overlooked, bu! t well worth the price of admission and the effort one might put intoit.

Grandmaster Michael Stean pioneered the explication of the basic themes of chess strategy that other writers, such as John Emms, (Simple Chess), have found worthy of emulation. I bought the first edition of this book on June 9, 1983 and, aside from Nimzowitsch's My System, this is the most useful chess book I have ever purchased, word-for-word and dollar-for-dollar! I anticipated the second edition of Stean's book in my review of Dvoretsky's Strategic Play: School of Chess Excellence 3.

I expected the author himself, Michael Stean, to correct trivial errors and add a few nuggets of modern chess wisdom but it was Fred Wilson who edited the text to eliminate simple errors, rephrased British colloquialism into American English and translated descriptive notation into algebraic notation without adding any new chess ideas to the text. Nonetheless, as long as there is no substantial modification of the original text, I shall always award five stars to this book without worrying about the level of players it would serve well. (There are very well written books on many subjects for high school students that should not be downgraded because they are either over the heads of grade school kids or too simple for college students.)

Stean's brilliant introductory chapter whets ones appetite and piques ones interest so much that one wants to read through this slim volume in one sitting but please don't. I created a mnemonic from the titles of the remaining six chapters that I run through my mind in a few games where my plan must be revised. Appropriately, I use MOSCOW thus: M for minority attack, (half-open files); O for open files; S for space; C for color, (black squares and white squares); O for outposts and W for weak pawns.

This book not only raises the acquisition of space, combined with denying the opponent of same, to supreme consideration but it also demonstrates best the advice to attack where one has gained space so as to effect conversion to other advantages. One feels relieved somewhat when, on page 136, one is told, "When you have a spatial advantage, there need be no hurry to form an active plan, that will come in due course." The challenge is how to acquire more space when your opponent is trying to do precisely the same thing.

At the bottom of page 101, the explanation that Black develops the black-squared Bishop `passively' on e7, after playing e6, in order to deprive White of the use of an outpost on d5, in the Sicilian, was justification enough for not considering g6, followed by Bg7 at which point e6 will leave the d pawn quite weak. This is a great guide to the placement of the pieces and an encouragement to read all analyses and asides in a chess book that many readers skip. Try using two chess sets on the second pass through games or game segments. Speaking of game segments, this book demonstrates clearly, without saying so in as many words, that positional chess players see a game of chess as an organic whole while tacticians may solve "mate in three" problems ad infinitum with game segments.

I am as impressed with this edition of Stean's book as I was with the earlier edition and I could end my review here but, as a knowledge promoter, having taught graduate engineering courses several decades ago, I wish to share some `humorous' observations on the new edition with the reader.

Fred Wilson succeeded in his mission, though a few new errors were introduced. Most noteworthy is that the use of algebraic notation removed all ambiguities in the earlier descriptive notation. By this I mean that if it was possible for more than one pawn or either knight or either rook or the queen to have made a move described in the earlier edition, the algebraic notation unequivocally stated the specific square and, where necessary, piece involved. One of the things that amused me in the new edition was that an attempt at word-for-word translation confused both notations, for instance, on page 9, Fred wrote "White's c4 square" in place of "White's QB4 square." In algebraic notation, is c4 not the same for both players while QB4 was indeed different for each player in the descriptive notation?

As far as I could tell, Fred corrected almost every error in the first edition, for example: in the analysis of Karpov-Spassky on page 61, he inserted a `with' in the comment after move 9. Ng5! In the analysis on page 80, an earlier 3. ... R-B1 that should have been 3. ... R-B7 was corrected to 3. ... Rc2?? but should Fred have added his own `??' as he also added a `!' notation to move 11. e4(!) on page 158? Should we trust the assessment of a move by Fred where Grandmaster Stean declined to make one? Right after diagram 71, the analysis, 19. dxc6 e.p. corrected 19. PxP e.g.; in the last variation in the book, on page 160, 36. Rxf6+ redeemed an earlier mistake, 36. RxB+ when indeed it was a Black knight that was captured on move 36, as Black's last Bishop disappeared on move 25.

A few, inconsequential errors that Fred introduced are: on page 5, he wrote "a piece beyond the second rate" when he meant "a piece beyond the second rank" as Stean had written. Fred erred in the fifth line from the bottom of page 12 with `win again a ...' where `win against a ...' had been correct. On page 102, the second line should have started, "After g6 and Bg7" rather than "After g6 and Bb7." On page 107, Fred wrote "This is what we are talking about when we saw things like ..." when he meant "when we say things like." An earlier reviewer mentioned the misuse of the word `complication' in "successful complication" on page 121 when "successful completion" was written in the earlier edition. That reviewer then went on to rate the book low for poor editing. Do you think Stean's magnificent elucidation of basic chess strategy should suffer from minor oversights of an editor? The third line from the bottom of page 135 could have done without the `of' and the last-but-one line on page 137 should have included the word `starting' in place of `startling.'

Finally, those who do not mind British idiosyncrasies might have wanted the expression of delight and satisfaction -- "Very neat" - preserved as Stean wrote it in the previous edition but it was expunged by Fred just before "The double threat of Qxe7 ..." at the bottom of page 12. Except one is an unforgiving grammarian, Fred may be excused for substituting the word `unkept' for `unkempt' in the middle of page 58 as many Americans might neither have heard nor used the latter word before.

Every chess player has a "best chess book ever read" and this one is mine. My rating was around 1500 to 1600 USCF when I read this book and when I finished reading this book my rating jumped to 1800+. It is obvious that I learned SO much about positional chess from this book! The book is only a little over a hundred pages but every page is packed with excellent positional insight. Before this book I had read My System by Aaron Nimzovitch which was really helpfull to my chess (but nothing compared to this book)! My sugestion of chess progression in terms of chess books would go like:
Winning Chess by Yasser Seirawan and Jeremy Silman
Winning Chess Tactics by Yasser Seirawan and Jeremy Silman
Winning Chess Strategy by Yasser Seirawan and Jeremy Silman
A couple of combination books like...
1001 Checkmates by Fred Reinfeld (cheap and many puzzles)
1001 Chess Combinations by Fred Rienfeld (cheap and many puzzles)
Pandolfini's Endgame Course by Bruce Pandolfini

...and once you have worked through the basics in those books, then Simple Chess will be a great source of instruction.

When I read this book in college at my college library I went WOW and looked to buy this book and found out it was out of print. I looked everywhere to buy a used version of this treasure of a work and thank goodness Dover has deemed to reprint it (and in Algebraic)!

For the serious chess player, I would also recomend (after reading Simple Chess):

Reassess Your Chess by Jeremy Silman
The Inner Game by Andrew Soltis

If a player seriously works through all these books then there is no reason why they should not be a class A player or better (if supplemented with tournament chess and analysing thier games afterward).

I agree with all the positive observations made by the other reviewers, but would like to extend the list of typos started by Dr. Salawu. Here are the errors I've found, with page numbers as they appear in the 2002 Dover algebraic edition:

p.15, variation following move 22: "(23...Kb3" should be "(23...Kc6"
p.33, 6th para: "conceding the d4 square" should be "conceding the d5 square"
p.47, 2nd para: the omitted 21st Black move in the variation is Ne5
p.52: "7. Bxc3" should be "7. bxc3"
p.96, variation following move 31: the move after 32. Nxf4 should be Rc1+
p.102, 1st para: "Bb7" should be "Bg7"
p.129, 1st para: "all kings" should be "all kinds"
p.129, last para: Black's 12th move in the second variation should be Rh5, not Rh4
p.158: Black's 4th move was Bb7, not Bg7
p.160, 1st line: "28. Bc5!" should be "28. Bc5+!"

This is a really super little book which covers a number of fundamental aspects of chess strategy. Each chapter discusses a different kind of positional advantage and the correct methods for exploiting it. If I remember correctly, the topics are establishing outposts for pieces, attacking weak pawns, penetrating the enemy's position via (i) open files or (ii) a weak colour complex, positional pressure along half-open files and its connection to the strategy of the minority attack and utilizing superior mobility created by a space advantage.

One word of warning, however, this is definitely not a beginners' book on chess strategy. The discussions are quite deep and seem to me to presuppose a solid understanding of chess. On the other hand it is just perfect if you've played a few years and have a basic understanding of chess strategy that needs to be deepened. Just one example, as a chess novice I knew that rooks "belonged" on open files. But Micheal Stean taught me not only why they belong there (control of an open file aims at penentration of the enemy's position along a rank) but under what circumstances such penetration is likely to be successful or unsuccessful (e.g. unsuccessful if the enemy king defends the penetration squares on the rank, successful if you have the more active minor pieces which can stop the enemy rooks contesting the open file).

Light, small and insightful, I often take this book as a perfect travelling companion for brushing up on those basic strategic points on the go.

If you see this in a bookstore look at his analysis of the first game in the introduction (Botvinnik-Szilagyi). If that doesn't sell you then nothing will.

This is the most instructive chess book I own (sadly, I own many). I have all the "standards" - Silman, Chernev etc - but this is simply the best. I won't dwell on its quality, because other reviewers have covered that. I will say that you will never look at the board the same way again after reading it.

The book does assume some previous reading on positional concepts, but it doesn't assume any competence (trust me). Everyone's read some inappropriate positional tome early in their career, so this shouldn't be a problem for most people.

Another reviewer has said something to the effect that every sentence has some instructive value, and I couldn't agree more. When I first read it I glossed over some things as I was caught up in the prose and the "main point", but on subsequent readings I realized that there is a whole second layer - a kind of indirect, subconscious instruction - in the writing when he sets context or alludes to alternatives. Take a relaxed read first up, by all means, but I urge you to give it a real serious word by word analysis subsequently. The prose is very deliberate. There are no throw away lines. It is a gold mine.

I remember reading that a publishing house was trying to do a new edition of the original (descriptive notation) edition in the late 90s but that Stean was uninterested. I am so glad he changed his mind. It is a pity that such a talent has remained silent for so long. I wish he would write again. Anything.

Study tactics, and read this. Maybe chess is simple after all.

After only several casual hours of study I learned more about strategy and planning than I could have ever imagined. I have tediously worked my way through other books (Lessons in Chess Strategy, Silmans various works, Euwe and Kramers Middlegame series; these are all great books by the way) but have never felt instant gratification before. I agree with the other reviews, this is NOT A PRIMER. Its a small book, so several days is all you need to absorb this fantastic book. Very Highly recommended by an improving player. Cheers!

I received this book in the mail and thought "another chess book for temporary amusement" -- then, to the shelf it would go to collect dust for years. I'm happy to say I was WAY wrong on that line of thinking!!

This is the most absorbing chess book I have ever read!

That said, it is not for beginners (stated many times before by others), and it is not for players who only enjoy tactics and suicidal attacks. This is the essence of positional chess in one book-- captured and explained in a very impressive manner by Stean.

My opinion is subjective -- I love positonal play and believe that's the reason to play the game! But I've already learned so many things (outposts, minority attack, etc.); my eyes have been opened to these "secrets" like never before. I feel like I have at least a small understanding of what GM's are looking for in their games, from a positional standpoint.

Also, I like the fact that the games are more recent than My System (which is very good)-- you get to see the Siclian and King's Indian and others, not just the Ruy Lopez and QGD of the early 1900's.

It's hard to put into words why this book is so choice, but I wish it was 500 pages-- I could live as a recluse with this book and a board!

To all my future opponents-- please ignore this book and stick with tactics and your kamikaze style play-- that might make our future battles so much easier for me!

Thank you Michael Stean-- a fantasic effort on your part!! Too bad it took me this long to discover it.