I'm looking for an in-depth book to help me become an extremely solid player. I'm aware of how the pieces move but I don't know what "Sicilian" or "Indian defense" mean. Got any high recommendations?

-Gracias Senor

Chernev's Logical Chess and a ton of other beginner books perhaps? There are a number of good authors with good books out there. The Sicilian and Indian defenses are basically just names for distinct opening trees. The former being 1. e4 c5, the latter 1. d4 Nf6.
I wouldn't get too caught up in any of the opening business just yet.

I don’t know about beginner books because I’ve never read one but from what I’ve heard on this site Chernev’s book is a good one. However one thing that is often neglected: you should get a book of classical games and play over the games contained in it. This will give you a good idea of all the various openings and the patterns associated with them as well as exposure to different middle game and end games. Tartakower’s 500 Master Games of Chess is a classic and well worth purchasing. All the games are collected by opening. I think it’s probably written in the old descriptive notation instead of algebraic though. Another possibility if you need algebraic notation is to get a book of somebody’s “best games” or a tournament book containing all the games from that event. I just got Vol. 1 & 2 of “The Art of Bisguier” and am thoroughly enjoying them. It’s not so important that you understand all the notes but rather the exposure to master chess that you’re getting.

People tell me I’m full of it when I say that but I never owned an opening or middle game book when I learned to play chess. All I ever had was a couple books of best game collections and that was enough to get me a 1600+ rating in my first tournament.

I'm not sure if this list will help you, but a few of my favorite chess books:

The Life and Games of Mikhail Tal - Mikhail Tal
A great book. Tal is a great writer, though this must have something to do with his study of Philology. The games in it are marvelous, full of complications and tactics, just playing through and thinking about all the games will improve your tactical ability. A very entertaining read.

Attack with Mikhail Tal - Mikhail Tal & Iakov Damsky
Recommending another Tal book makes me seem a little obsessed, doesn't it? Maybe so, but I like this book a lot too. Somehow this book drastically improved by win rate; especially in blitz/quick games. Though I wouldn't expect the same.

My System - Aron Nimzovich
This is a chess classic. A book on positional chess, which also improved my win rate, and you should expect so too.

Play the Sicilian Dragon - Edward Dearing
I've only owned this book for a few weeks, though I really enjoy it. A lot of the variations are fascinating, though the book is utterly useless you play the Dragon most of the time.

I doubt this list will help you at your level, so this is another list that may help you:

Logical Chess: Move by Move - Irving Chernev
It is a good book, and should help you improve a lot, though there is something about this book that I never really liked that much, but I'm not quite sure what it was.

Understanding Chess Move by Move - John Nunn
This is like Logical Chess, yet is more modern, thus containing more modern openings, Ruy Lopez Closed, Sicilian, Kings Indian Defence, etc. A great follow up after Logical Chess.

Old Dover Chess books
Look around for old Dover (that's a publishing company) books. You often have to read descriptive notation, but you can often find nice game collections for a cheap price. You will probably be able to find these types of books at a local library, or online: Chess

Hope this helps.

Octal's list may be good books, but they're not what I'd recommend for a beginner.

The usual recommendation for beginners is "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Chess" by Patrick Wolff. It's not just about the basic moves. It also goes into history, basics of strategy and tactics, etc. It will give you a good starting point.

Then move on to "Everyone's 2nd Chess Book" by Dan Heisman. The name says it all. It's a book on how to improve once you've got the basics down. Heisman is a master and professional coach who also writes a column called the Novice Nook at chesscafe.com, which I highly recommend. Click their "archives" link and read the past few years' worth of that monthly column for more from him.

And then there's Chernev's classic "Logical Chess: Move by Move". This is probably the most commonly recommended book for beginners. It's just 33 master games, with every single move explained. While it's good for all aspects of the game, I actually consider it to be mostly an opening book. It will teach you how and why to open a chess game, without focusing on memorizing specific variations.

--Fromper

Personally I would recommend Laszlo Polgar's book '"Chess. 5334 problems, combinations, and games" (easy to find on amazon)
It will improve your chess playing far better than studying opening books. Study several problems or key games per day and you will find your brain learns to unscramble chess pretty quickly.
That said, studying openings can be really fun - but I prefer to do it on my own with a chess board and my fritz chess engine for back-up! The books come later.

Miscellaneous musings from various GM’s and chess instructors:

If the student doesn't know how to think correctly he will never be able to play very good chess. Even if he studies much theory, reads many chess books, etc. - WGM Yelena Dembo

In his book The Inner Game of Chess GM Andrew Soltis said: "A popular view among amateurs is that grandmasters ... routinely see 10 moves ahead. There are, of course, examples of this by GMs, but they are relatively rare. Much more common is the kind of calculation that calls for seeing not more than two moves into the future".

Not all masters agree on how one should advance but one of the best ways is playing over lots and lots of games. Not games by weak players and I’d avoid today’s modern GM’s. The reason is that they’ve developed a style (for various reasons) where they are often willing to make positional concessions for practical chances because of modern day fast time controls. Thus their games can be confusing and difficult to understand. I’d recommend games of classical masters. Even better are tournament books. Books of “My Best Games” are just that…best games. Better are games where you see GM’s whipping up on IM’s or IM’s pummeling Masters. You see all the warts that don’t make it into game collections and realize not all games by very strong players are masterpieces worthy of print.

Opening theory is fascinating to lower rated players and Fine’s old Ideas Behind the Chess Openings book is still one of the best to get acquainted with the general ideas. However this is not the way to increase playing strength and will actually hinder your advancement if it’s the main thrust of your study program. FM Pelts and GM Lev Alburt in Comprehensive Chess Course (Vol II): "We beg students who are addicted to opening manuals to remember that most players who spend their time studying theory never reach A-level."

Each opening has (or should have) a basic middlegame strategy behind it and all variations will be designed to carry out that strategy. If a move does not fit into the correct strategy, it’s probably not good. This brings us to the point that in order to really improve you must increase your positional understanding, tactical awareness and endgame knowledge. You have to supplement that by playing games AND playing over hundreds of master games. All this is designed to increase chess knowledge in general. That way when a opponent plays something you are not familiar with you will have some idea of the basic strategy and can judge how his move fits in (or not) and have some idea of where to start looking to plan your own strategy. Chess is not three different parts, opening, middle and end. They are all related so your opening should flow into a middlegame with a clearly defined strategy.

WISDOM FROM GM NIGEL DAVIES:
“Players who understand how to play Isolated Queen's Pawns, Gruenfeld/Catalan positions, Hedgehogs or King's Indian Structures never go through the much reported agonies of club players who attempt to memorize things.The last couple of days I've actually found some time to study some chess, printing out 35 selected games in a particular opening and playing through them with a board and pieces. The next step is to look at some details...
This is why it's good to be a generalist, whereby you have more patterns to draw on in any new situations and then draw multiple comparisons. People are often surprised by my ignorance of variations ... but the same is true of many GMs, IMs and just good club players. But if you have a good knowledge of various middlegame positions you will know what to go for and should be able to position your pieces well in the opening.

On the other hand the mnemonic approach to chess openings will leave a player disorientated as soon as something he hasn't studied comes along. And this ALWAYS happens, either when your opponent varies from your line through ignorance or because he cooperates to the VERY END.”

Studying openings in depth is overrated by lower rated players. Opening knowledge will not be of any benefit if your middle and endgame play is weak. Knowledge of opening theory may only mean the difference between an equal position and a slight advantage or disadvantage unless you are a master.

Most players don’t know why they lost a particular game. They blame a blunder, missing a move by their opponent or any of a hundred excuses. Usually there is a whole list of reasons: attitude, bad strategy, missed tactics, but often it’s failure to understand the basics. Most books are about openings. The reason is because most players are not interested in anything else. They are not interested in how to plan or how masters calculate, or endgame theory. Despite their claims most players are simply in a hurry to win a quick game and move on to another. Just look on any Internet site and it’s not unusual to see players with a hundred or more games going at the same time. How can one play that many games at one time and devote sufficient time to each individual game to play it well? They are the same players who buy opening books that promise them they will win more games if they play a particular opening. They will study tactics until they can do the exercises fast and accurately then complain because they still miss them in their own games.

Most players think that they already know chess basics, so why spend the time learning them again. But Jeremy Silman has discovered most players fail miserly and lack the understanding of basic fundamentals. They have problems with a lack of understanding concerning the purpose of the opening, no knowledge of planning and the thinking processes, no understanding of elementary endings. Nor do they understand how the opening, middle game and ending are related.

What I'm writing here, I suppose, is more of a potential training plan you could use. I can't at all endorse the superiority of the path in any way compared to others, and please don't let my depth of writing put you off, but if you want to start solidly, you may find the things I enjoyed quite nice too.

The books that have been of most enjoyable reading and influence to me, and what effect they had:

I forget the first few books I ever read, which introduced me to basic tactics and ideas. But for general enjoyment, I have loved reading The Inner Game (Dominic Lawson), chronicling the 1993 PCA World Championship between Kasparov-Short. I also greatly enoyed Korchnoi's, Tal's, and Kasparov's autobiographies.

The first book I read once I was of the 1000 level, was Bill Hartston's Teach Yourself Better Chess. It took a few goes, but literally, I jumped 400 points overnight. If you have ability that's best trained by verbal explanations and examples, that's a book for you.

If you're interested in learning ideas behind a wide range of openings, allowing you to specialise, then Cadogan's book which is rare, Chess Openings for Juniors, is very good. Don't be put off by the title: it focuses on ideas and developmental soundness as opposed to the blind alleys of variations of say, MCO. If you like that, Gábor Kallai's Basic Chess Openings (in parts: e4, d4) goes into greater depth, albeit the variations themselves are now in some cases out of date. If you find yourself strongly drawn to one or other variation, something like the Starting Out series would be recommendable. While it's better to go for ideas and understanding, a few killer punches never hurt anyone I read those books a lot as a junior and they gave me a sounder understanding in general, if only skimming through and committing lines to my rather talented memory, which I'm lucky to have.

If you ever want to study endgames when you're at a good solid level, I can wholly recommend the book I call my bible; Muller/Lamprecht's Fundamental Chess Endings. It isn't something you can simply go through like My System, it probably is something you'll keep as a reference tome to dip into for years.

In attack and tactical areas, I have just bought Vukovic's The Art of Attack. LeMoir's Deadly Chess Tactician is more sacrificially oriented, though some material is for those above average players unlike myself. Gary Lane did a nice book, How to Attack in Chess, which might do well. And you can't go wrong from any standpoint with a book from Mikhail Tal. I also own a little book, Blunders and Brilliancies, by Moe Moss and Ian Mullen, which is replete with winning continuation puzzles, graded by difficulty and themes.

When you want to move onto hero worship, Morphy and Capablanca would be an ideal starting point for simple solid but powerful chess. From there if you enjoyed it, you could move to Fischer, and perhaps later if you wanted a challenge, Botvinnik. For aggressive chess without compromising everything, read Alekhine, Spassky, Kasparov. For solid defensive or counterattacking, Smyslov has the simple style of Capablanca without all the efforts of deep understanding required by say studying Petrosian. And if you want nutty attacks galore, Tal, Shirov, and Nezhmetdinov would be good.


But for now, I recommend simple tactical practise, learning from your own mistakes, be it hanging pieces or getting cramped, and simply enjoying the game. Many is the player who have left the game because they've overworked.

Here’s the list of books I learned the most from (most are long out of print):

Modern Chess Strategy-Ludek Pachman
Taught me how to handle each piece and situations they operate best in
100 Selected Games-Botvinnik
My Best Games-Reshevsky
These two books taught me how to apply what I learned in Pachman’s book. I learned much about all phases of the game including the openings I played. These are the first chess books I had.
Modern Endgame in Theory and Practice-Griffith
Learned endgame basics from this well-written book.
Search for Chess Perfection-Purdy
A potpourri of easy to understand advice and instruction explained in a clear, concise manner, well annotated games and a bio.

The Road To Chess Mastery-Yermolinsky
Wish I’d had this book 40 years ago. No phony promises but he tells you how to study. This book should be a classic but it’s not likely it ever will because Yermo doesn’t make any promises or offer any quick, easy solutions. What he advocates is work.

Enjoyable books:
The Art of Bisguier Vol 1&2-Bisguier. Great games by a colorful player.
Super Nezh-Damsky. Nezhmetdinov’s games are just fun to play through if you like attacking chess, or if you don’t they are still great fun to play over.
My Best Games-Tartakower. Another colorful player with fascinating games.
500 Master Games-Tartakower. Classic games arranged by opening.

Never read any beginner books, opening books or books on tactics. The latter two came much later. I just started off studying best game collections and strategy.

Showalter, at what speed should I go through each master game? Should I play them really fast, really slow, or what?

Thanks.