Simple Chess: New Algebraic Edition (Dover Chess)

I'm a chess enthusiast that began studying and playing online a year ago. When I started I was rated 900-1000 in Chess.com. I already read My System by Nimzowitsch, understanding some of the key aspects of positional play, which enabled me to reach 1200-1300 points in the same website. Nevertheless, I gladly realised that every concept I read in My System was far better explained in Simple Chess, enabling me to reach 1400-1500 Elo points.The main virtue of the text is its honesty and its unpretentiousness. The author is fully aware that this book will not make you reach a GM level after reading it (specially if you are a beginner like me), but he is confident in the fact that the contents are universal and apply in almost every middlegame situation. Firstly, he focuses on the importance and creation of outposts, highlighting how crucial they are to build an attack. Secondly, he analyses the role that weak pawns have in a game. For me, this was by far the most illuminating chapter. How many times have you been struggling with yourself trying to determine the best course of action? For Stean the answer is simple: attack the opponent's weak pawns or squares. How simple!!! The opponent will be forced to defend and use some of his attacking pieces to defend his weaknesses. Then you reroute your attack to the new undefended place and voila, you have a strong attack. Simple chess at its finest.The other chapters are focused on open and semi-open files, dark/light squares and space. The author uses instructive examples after some little theory, in order to give you a practical idea on how to use this knowledge. The text, however, has some typos (other reviewer gave a detailed list in this site), but they are far from critical.I recommend this book for anyone who wants to seriously improve his/her game. The prose is simple and accesible to anyone. If you are already acquainted with some chess vocabulary, then you'll enjoy it even more. As you can see from other reviews, this book is also useful for players with greater Elo than mine. It is strongly recommended to read this book many times to completely absorb each concept and to avoid forgetting aspects of chess that are present in almost every game you will play.

This is a marvelous first or second book on positional play. Obviously, as others have stated, this is not a book for a complete beginner. But if you're class C or even a high class D player, this is a great place to learn about positional play. Note that I don't think its limited to those rating categories. Even a class A player, possibly even an expert, can go back to this text to refresh the basics. I recommend it as an introductory text simply because its so clear in its objectives and focused in its presentation. Also, obviously in a book this slim you really can't cover all of the different aspects of a more thorough book on positional chess. Stean doesn't talk about things like isolated d-pawns (although he gives games where they exist - its not the point of the example). Also, a beginner reading the chapter on minority attacks might well come to the conclusion that having a queen-side pawn majority gives one an inferior position. Indeed its hard to see how one would not come to that conclusion if this were your first exposure to these concepts. Nevertheless, I have to give this book 5 stars because it really hammers home the unifying principle of all positional chess: its all about the activity of the pieces. After reading Kmoch or Pachman or other more thorough (and more advanced) texts on positional chess, one can start thinking in terms of pawn breaks, head-duos, etc., and lose sight of this one fundamental truth of piece activity. But Stean puts it front and center in all of his chapters: outposts are important because they increase the power of pieces, weak pawns are bad because they tie down pieces to their defense, etc. That's why I said that even highly rated players can come back to this text and get refocused on the fundamental truths of positional chess. Overall, I believe this is one of the best chess books ever written.

This book is hardly groundbreaking, and you've probably heard of all these ideas (outposts, minority attack, weak squares, good/bad bishops, space, open files, etc...) if you've read My System or any of the various other middle game books that is out there.So, why did I give it five stars? Because he does an outstanding job explaining these important ideas in about the most concise, interesting and clearest way I've ever seen before. He explains to the reader that many of the GM Games/Examples he's chosen you've probably never seen before because they are too simple and unsensational to capture the limelight of chess, but for that very reason is WHY he chose them. Not to say the games he chooses are boring, they are beautiful for their instruction and usually the end result is a pleasing finishing combination that only came as a result of the earlier positional advantages that it was built upon. Tactics and Stategic/Positional Play cannot be separated, one springs from the other.The book is easy to follow, and the variations are to the point, most of his focus is directed to the strategic or positional ideas he is explaining, so there is plenty of prose. I'm around 1900 USCF and I've heard of these positional ideas all my chess playing life and yet after reading this book it still strikes me as fresh and instructional. It is one of the most delightful chess books I've read, and its one of the few chessbooks I'd recommend to a wide audience, but intermediate players would seem to be its main beneficiaries.The only thing I can criticize is the editorial job done on this book. Seriously, there are so many typos and strange little errors in the Kindle Version that it obviously wasn't proofread very well. I don't know if this is also a problem in the print edition, but they are quite noticeable in the digital one. I will not take stars away for this, since its the material that I am reviewing.

One of the very, very, very small group of books on chess strategy written in Plain English with occasional twinkles of humour and which, above all, makes sense. Most strategy books say "blah, blah blah, obviously..." then go into six million variations from master games without in any way linking them to the thing the intellectually idle author says was "obvious". Stean never falls into this trap. One to read and re-read.

My order arrived today, and, I've been having a good browse of it. A great chess book (by Dover publications.) Very good. Thanks.

The design is better than most chess books, and the idea is new to me. I had never heard of "outposts". It is composed of several dozen literate game narratives. I personally find it hard to think more than a couple of moves into any notation, especially algebraic. Because of the conceptual basis of the book, I will likely reread the book playing the game on my computer or on a chessboard simultaneously. I would say it is changing the way I think about chess strategy. Maybe I'll improve.

Comprei o modelo virtual e estou estudando realizando a leitura e executando as partidas com tabuleiro para melhor percepção das abordagens desde a aquisição a uma semana atrás. É um ótimo livro e as ideias propostas de estudos seguem uma sequencia lógica que parece muito boa. Os exemplos são muito bons e refletem cada um uma passagem pelos diversos temas como posto avançado, casas fracas, peões enfraquecidos, etc.Adquiri outros livros também, mas recomendo este para quem quer aprender os lances relacionados a construção de ideias de meio jogo. Muito bom.

Livro excelente para os primeiros passos na estratégia do xadrez! Com partidas simples e lances muito bem comentados, esse livro é excelente para principiantes! Há poucos diagramas, o que pode não ajudar alguns, mas que não desmerece esse excelente livro! Recomendadíssimo e cinco estrelas!