Review: How to Reassess Your Chess

August 6, 2010
Tags: Product Reviews, New, Etc

National Master Kayden Troff wrote this chess book review for Wholesale Chess.

Chess Book: How To Reassess Your Chess

How to Reassess Your Chess is one of the most important chess books that you could own for the improving chess player!   If you don’t have this in your chess book library then you are really missing out!  It takes the beginning chess player’s narrow vision to a whole new world of how to win.  Most beginners only think about material advantage on the chess board, or tactically cool ways to defeat their opponent.

How to Reassess Your Chess describes in a very simple way that there are seven different ways to win a chess game and material advantage is only one of them.  This means that if you are behind in material it is not time to raise your hands in surrender; it is time to buckle down and fight with the other 6 ways to win!  And if you don’t know them then you are going to be in trouble.

Improve Your Chess with Seven Powerful Ideas

I credit this chess book for helping me get from a 1700 rating (where I was kind of stuck) to over 2000 and to National Master at 2200.  It opened up new positional ideas that I hadn’t really considered and then when I started working with my GM coaches I had a good foundation for their teaching because of what I learned in this chess book.  The seven powerful ideas presented by Jeremy Silman in this chess book are:

1. Superior Minor Pieces

2. Control (of the Center, Ranks, Files and Diagonals)

3. Lead in Development

4. Material

5. Space

6. Pawn Structure (isolated, doubled, backwards)

7. Tempo

Teaching Superior Minor Pieces

Chess Strategy: Superior Minor Pieces

Let me give you an example.  At our chess camp, we teach about the “Superior Minor Pieces” by first teaching our students about the point values of pieces.  This is pretty standard for chess and we will assign a basic value of 3 points to a Knight or a Bishop.  But we will get out a superhero cape and have one of the kids try it on while we explain that we can power up the Knight or the Bishop and we can make them worth far more than their 3 point value by where we position it on the chess board.  I read a quote that if you have a Knight that can’t be kicked out of e5 or d5 it is worth a Queen because it constantly harasses your opponent and it has almost the full scope of the chess board to jump in and fork your opponent’s pieces.  I one hundred percent agree with this idea and I have used many of these “super pieces” to win high level games.  In fact I have had some games where these super powered Knights and Bishops are so strong that I can keep my Queen in reserve for later in the game because I don’t need it yet.

Teaching Space

Another fun thing that we do at our camp to teach them about “Space” is that we will get 4 kids to come up to the front of the class (volunteers of course).  This activity is to teach them the disadvantages if someone breaks into your “Space”.  We have them tuck in their shirts and drop large crickets down the back of their shirts.  The object of the exercise is to get the cricket out as quickly (and alive) as possible.  It usually only takes a few seconds, but we explain if the cricket were a bumblebee then their shirt would be a disadvantage just like someone getting inside your fence of pawns and invading your “Space” in a chess game.  Instead of keeping out the unwanted pest your shirt would hold it in and there is little to no defense when it gets in.  And it is the same when someone gets inside your fence of pawns.  There is usually little to no defense to keep your opponents pieces from attacking once they invade your “Space”.  This is a fun way that we teach our students Jeremy Silman’s concept as explained in How to Reassess Your Chess; and you can guess that they don’t forget this lesson.

These are only a couple of ways that we use the principles taught in How to Reassess Your Chess to reinforce our own chess and teach our students to do so. It would be difficult to find a better chess book to help you understand what is meant by positional chess versus tactical chess!

I Highly Recommend How to Reassess Your Chess

How To Reassess Your Chess WorkBook

I should also mention that How to Reassess Your Chess starts out with some crucial endgame ideas that will help you understand the seven powerful ways to win a chess game later on.  IM Jeremy Silman talks about un-learning the bad habits that beginning and intermediate students develop, and teaches that starting your understanding with a foundation of these principles will give you what you need to reach Master and beyond.  I love this book and it also has a companion volume – The How to Reassess Your Chess Workbook which gives real life examples that you can try out the seven powerful things on your own.  And then it gives an explanation of how you should have used the principle to solve the exercise.  I highly recommend both books as a staple of your chess library!

You can read more about National Master Kayden Troff in a few other articles on our blog including: Blitz Chess Champion and One-on-one with Child Chess Prodigy.