With "Everyone's Second Chess Book", National Master Dan Heisman tries to fill the gap between books for absolute beginners and texts written for intermediate players. I bought this book about 10 months after I started to play chess at a point where I was not sure if studying chess can make me a better chess player, or in plain English: during one of these phases where I wondered if I could get anything right during a chess game. The decision of buying this book was therefore very much based on the idea of "back to the basics" and even though I knew already most of the material covered in the book I do not regret buying it.

"Everyone's Second Chess Book" starts with a chapter on the basics of learning chess: pattern recognition, "chunking", and, from my point of view most importantly, making mistakes. Dan Heisman sketches the typical development of a beginning chess player through 5 levels, describing typical traits and weaknesses of players at these levels. The target group of the book are players rated from below 100 (still learning the very basics) to about 1400. While reading how improvement works does not make someone a better player right away, reading from an experienced chess coach that making all these mistakes that I am so frequently cursing on is just a normal part of becoming a good chess player caused an instant morale upswing. And actually doing the exercises and following the training advice will have a positive effect on any aspiring novice, not only kids although the tone of the book is geared towards children and their parents.

The book continues with some basic board visualization exercises and general advice such as "develop all your pieces". In addition to that, it gives many valuable lessons on setting priorities right and on correcting some bad habits like playing too quickly in slow time control games. Dan Heisman provides many example positions from beginner chess games to illustrate typical mistakes and ways to avoid them as well as a few complete annotated games.

Aimed at beginner-level players, Dan Heisman not only encourages participation in tournaments but also provides some basic tips concerning chess etiquette and comments on common misunderstandings of the United States Chess Federation (USCF) rules. This strikes me as particularly important as even the official USCF website provides little material in this area beyond attempts to sell the rulebook.

In summary, the book gives people who just know the rules and want to become better chess players a tool set for improvement. The book is well written and due to the well-chosen examples and anecdotes, particularly the ones on the suffering of a national master and well-known chess coach when he watches his son provide perfect examples for making mistakes, it was never boring. The book is with barely more than 120 pages quite thin, but I prefer that over books that include useless or off-topic stuff just to increase the page count. Conclusion: highly recommended for new chess players. And even more seasoned chess players might find it worthwhile to skim through it and ask themselves if they still suffer from some very basic mistakes.

If you want to read more material on chess improvement by Dan Heisman, make sure to visit his column at www.chesscafe.com. His June 2007 column (pdf) deals with beginner's misconceptions and typical mistakes.

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written by dutchdefence, June 26, 2007

You can never know enough basics. I feel people throw books about basics (or stuff about basics in general) to the side way too quickly and think they allready seen it all. Untill one day you walk into a brick wall and realize you don't

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