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Title: Simple Chess: New Algebraic Edition by Michael Stean, Fred Wilson ISBN: 0-486-42420-0 Publisher: Dover Publications Pub. Date: 01 January, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $7.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.3 (10 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: exelent book on positional play
Comment: this is a thin book of about 120 pages written in old descriptive notation . it is not for beginners but for players rated at least 1100 or above .it is concerned about positional play and chess strategy .its chapters are outposts ,weak pawns ,open files,half open files(minority attack ),black squares and white squares and space .it is very clearly written and to the point.i own more than 100 chess books and i rate it in top 15 in what i have read .there is more clearly written chess wisdom in it than some books of double its size.sadly ,it is perhaps out of print now so try to find it in used book stores .
Rating: 4
Summary: Good, but...
Comment: I think even the reviewers who have gone out of their way to say this isn't a book for beginners are underestimating the difficulty level of it. I'm rated in the 1500s USCF and still maybe should have waited until I added another 100 points before tackling it. And this wasn't the first strategy book I read. In comparison, I'd rate it as one healthy step more advanced than either Lessons of a Chess Coach or The Amateur's Mind.
Not that it's impossible to understand what the author is talking about; it's just that you may not be able to make use of it yet. Stean offers some easily digestible information, such as the relationship between half-open files and the minority attack, and the importance of entry points on open files. But to a weakie, his in-game examples of strategy will seem to be undercut by (a) not-so-easy-to-see tactical shots, and (b) mid-stream shifts in strategy. Stean also doesn't always carry to the games to the point where it's easy to see the win in hand. This isn't really a criticism of Stean - that's just the way chess is - but it does make the book challenging for patzers.
Rating: 1
Summary: Some Good Material; Lazy, Careless Editor
Comment: This book features an absolutely great beginning. Sadly, it then degenerates into just another typical chess book, except that it is filled with annoying editorial errors.
Stean begins with a great discussion of Botvinnik's famous win with White in the King's Indian Attack, where Botvinnik dominated the light squares after Black gave up the light-squared bishop with an early ...Bc8-g4-xNf3. After explaining the game, Stean discusses two additional diagrams, where the pieces have been removed from the board, and you can see only the pawns of Botvinnik and his opponent. Stean explains how Botvinnik won because in that pawn structure White has access to two fine central squares for his pieces, c4 and d5, while Black has access to none. "The piece outpost count is a healthy 2-0 for White." Then he explains how Black could have improved this situation by advancing his c-pawn to c4, acquiring the c5, b3, and d3 squares for his pieces. After reading this explanation, I was immediately able to see and exploit similar ideas in my own games, which I had never noticed with such clarity before (and I am a USCF 2150 player). Taken as a whole, this is the finest explanation of a chess game that I have ever seen. Everything is crystal-clear.
After that beginning, one naturally gets excited, looking forward to more of the same. That expectation is sorely disappointed. No other game in the book is annotated with half so much clarity or thoroughness or care. Sadly, Stean's book degenerates into just another commentary on chess games, more or less the same that you see in many other books.
How does SIMPLE CHESS compare with other strategy books? His phrasing and examples are mostly quite good, but, except for the first game, Stean's explanations are no better than those of Euwe and Kramer, Pachman, Keres and Kotov, or many others. But Stean's book has far fewer examples than those other authors give. This is a small book. Too small.
Except for his very first example, where he gives us a taste of greatness, Stean falls far short of Jeremy Silman for clarity and thoroughness, and, as one might expect, the young Michael Stean was not remotely in the same league as Bronstein (Zurich, 1953 Tournament Book) for depth of chess insight. There are other, better books for learning chess strategy.
This new algebraic edition features terrible editing. There are annoying diagram errors (for example, the diagram on p. 118 has two white kings when there should be a white king and white rook). There are unintentially hilarious editorial errors (for example, on p. 121 it says "Heralding the successful complication of White's opening stategy" when he obviously meant "completion," not "complication"). There are some silly chess errors (for example, Stean's note to Black's seventh move on p. 90, where 8. Rxd7 obviously wins immediately instead of Stean's erroneous 8. Rxa8+). Clearly Stean's editor was a lazy, careless, thoughtless bum.
We wonder why the book degenerated after such a promising, great beginning. Did Stean lack the patience and time to give the rest of the games the same care and attention that he gave to the Botvinnik game in the introduction? Maybe. But I doubt that was the problem.
Almost every chess author in English complains that his editor gives him far too few pages for a book. Well, then, here's a speculation:
Stean probably did write explanations of the remaining games that were just as good as the first one. Then his editor, a chess idiot who had no clue about the value of what Stean had given him, awakened from his drunken stupor long enough to blurt out "too many pages" and chopped it down into the mediocre remains that you can now purchase.
This speculation about what happened has the charm of dovetailing nicely with the abundant proof we have that the editor of this book was a lazy, thoughtless idiot who cannot tell a king from a rook, or a complication from a completion.
Don't buy this book. Don't encourage idiot editors and thoughtless publishers. Apologies to Stean, who probably deserved much better than he got from Dover.
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