Book Review: Learn Chess A Complete Course

As soon as anyone gets interested in chess and wants to start finding their way into that world, one of the first things they notice is just how high the average standard of play is.

Log onto most sites and you'll find players of around the 1200 Elo rating and upward. While that isn't considered high in the chess world, for someone who's only just learned how all the pieces move (with an average rating of 400 Elo?), 1200 Elo is light years away.

So how does one learn and get oneself up to a decent beginning standard of play as quickly as possible so they don't have to humiliate themselves every time they step out onto the 64-squared minefield?

Easy. Just work through Learn Chess: A Complete Course by Alexander and Beach.

Originally published as two separate books back in the 1960s, these valuable guides are now available together in one small volume. And what a pair they make...

A considerable amount of thought and experience has gone into crafting this book, starting from how each piece moves to ending the second book with how to make a plan (although this comes a lot more easily once you've been through the exercises presented throughout). 

Working my way through from beginning to end, there were only a couple of times I felt the exercises were too tough or a little bit of a stretch. By and large, however, progress was smooth.

I particularly remember this book because of the chapter I started with: how to attack (chapter 6 of the first book). Some beginners might be appalled at the thought of learning to attack comes before learning the openings (way before the openings), but here's the clever bit. In teaching the reader how to attack the authors present... Scholar's Mate. 

Chess Game Strategies.com

Facepalm yet? Well don't. Having been a music teacher myself for many years, I know the most important thing in teaching is motivation. Keeping motivation high in beginners is the holy grail for teachers, no matter what they're teaching. So if you can keep people interested, they'll keep coming back for more. It's better to start with something easy, which you can grasp easily and progress quickly with, than something deep and dense which makes for an uphill climb straight off.

After all, it's only the beginning and this is only the start. You'll have time to move onto bigger and better things, but only if you're motivated to come back for more...

Scholar's Mate is something most beginners are familiar with (as opposed to most openings) so here you'll be able to grasp some basic principles of attacking, some variations of Scholar's Mate (that f7 square for black is a continual weak spot you always have to keep an eye out for), and how one can punish white for bringing out her queen too soon, all the while developing one's own pieces.

What starts out sounding like a lesson with limited potential, turns into the tentative but solid building blocks upon which these master teachers build upon.

Before I found this book I felt like I needed to learn ten billion openings (give or take!) in order to get myself off the ground. But at the same time felt that to be an overwhelming task and as such, never really got around to reading my openings books. I felt pretty demotivated. But after reading chapter 6 I was off. I supplemented this book with some playing and some chess puzzles, but at the start, my focus was mainly on this book. I felt that I was reading a course that had been tailor made for me and if I wasn't working from the book, I wasn't improving as quickly (exercises I found elsewhere were either too hard or too easy). Seriously, it's that well structured.

Whether it is strategy, checkmating or tactics, this book leads you in gently enabling you to grasp the concepts quickly and progress as quickly as you're willing to work. While everyone's different, when I started studying this book I was just under Elo 800. A couple of months later and I'm nearing Elo 950. I'm guessing that by the time I finish I'll be around Elo 1100. While it's impossible to say exactly what your Elo will be by the time you finish (or how long it will take you to finish the book), one thing's for sure, if you work conscientiously and diligently, your Elo will increase by a minimum of at least 200 points.

The contents are: 

Book One: 

1. How each piece moves 
2. Recording (writing the moves down, understanding chess notation) 
3. Check and Checkmate
4. Starting to play: the importance of extra material
5. the opening: development and the centre (contains no openings, just good basic opening principles)
6. learning to attack 
7. finishing the game (introduction to endgame theory: how to mate with a king and queen against a lone king; king and rook against a lone king)
8. pawn endings

Book two (page 95): 

1. winning material by double attack 
2. knight forks and pawn forks 
3. pins and skewers 
4. more ways of winning material 
5. mating the castled king 
6. winning the ending 
7. the openings (1e4 e5) 
8. further openings 
9. making a plan 
10. looking ahead

The only downside to this book which needs to be mentioned is just the sheer amount of typological errors in the games. This isn't just one or two, this is all too frequent throughout the examples in the first book. In a way it is a testament to the teaching that I was able to spot these errors and not become confused or demotivated! I know I'm not the only one to notice this and thankfully this book has been re-published by Everyman. It has also been updated, so better try that one instead and if anyone else has noted these errors in the earlier version, perhaps you could let us know if they've been rectified or not in the Everyman version. 

Overall though, this is one hell of a book. Highly recommended for beginners, chess coaches and parents of chess players.