I just played through them at a leisurely pace, maybe 10-15 minutes a game, unless I came to a particularly interesting game or position I wanted to analyze. These days I like to play through the games with the help of a good engine because it helps me see if I’m barking up the wrong tree or if the author has made any mistakes in analysis which sometimes they did in the old books. I wore the covers off the Reshevsky and Botvinnik books…they were my constant companions. I think what happened was I learned pattern recognition because I would often remember having seen a similar position so then had some idea of how to continue even if only in a vague way.

You've already received many recommendations of great books, but for your first chess books, I highly recommend the series written by American Grandmaster Yasser Seirawan. The first book is called "Play Winning Chess" and it offers a very good general introduction to basic principles. He also has books dedicated to particular aspects of the game - tactics, strategy, combinations, openings, endgames, etc.

After working through a good book on general principles, I second the recommendation to develop your board vision through solving lots of tactical puzzles. Seirawan's "Winning Chess Tactics" is a good book for this and "Sharpen Your Tactics!" by Lein and Archangelsky is also very good but somewhat more advanced.

Good luck!

+1 for the Seirawan series of books

These books were very well written by Seirawan and Silman and cover each topic with very understanable writing style...unlike myown

Also, nice posts in this tread, very informative.

Whichever speed leads to your understanding of the strategies.

According to the late US Senior Master Ken Smith (of Smith-Morra fame) you are going after quantity, not quality. He opined that after you have played over several hundred games you've increased your pattern recognition to the point you have a "feel" for the correct strategy. If you want to do a detailed analysis of a particular strategy, for example IQP positions, that should come later.

Of course Smith was never rated over 2500 and wasn't a titled player so he probably didn't know anything.

I remember Ken's Improving Your Chess section at the back of his big and entertaining catalogs

He said what you said he said, adding that no more than 15 minutes should be spent on a game.

His max FIDE ELO was 2365 as I recall, and he was a FM (and not shy about repeating this throughout his catalogs). I don't recall any teaching methods that were out of the mainstream. I'd certainly trust him for the basic stuff that would get someone to expert+.

Okay, thanks to you both.

So pretty much I play the moves in the game out casually, but once I see a move that stands out to my eye, such as f4, I stop playing out the moves and figure out why that move was played? Is there anything in addition to playing out the moves that I should do?

I just want to make sure I do it right before I jump into hundreds of games.

I've actually been doing a lot of this myself recently and another thing I find useful is to try to predict what the next move will be.

Try to think to yourself, "what would I do next" and then compare your move with the move made by the master. If his move was better, why was it better? As you said, pay special attention to the moves that seem to stand out and try to figure out why these choices were made.

When I used Smith's method of playing over games I kept track of the percentage of correct guesses just to make it more interesting. As I recall I started out with about 15-20% and eventually got to about 65-70% so the method worked. When I mentioned what happened to a veteran master all he said was, "Of course."

Ok, thank you.

One more thing: How long and how often should I go through master games? How many?