Recommend a good book about chess

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nerd

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I second

I had a Christmas Parrot one time named Chess. Thing was crazy. You could light a lighter and stick it under his left wing and he would sing Jingle Bells. Stick the lighter under his right wing and he would sing Silent Night. Stick the light directly under him and he would sing.........















Chessnuts Roasting Over and Open Fire!!!!!!!!!!!!!

If you're a relative beginner and want to up your game, work through a tactics book like Fred Reinfeld's "1001 Combination". It'll present you with various themes (fork, skewer, discovered check, etc.). Work through the exercises and your game will get dramatically better. Studying openings is worthless if you can't stop losing pieces every few moves.

If you're beyond that, I suggest a good basic endgame book.

If you just want to read a biography, then Pal Benko's is pretty good. Although out of print, Andrew Soltis' "Soviet Chess" is an outstanding "behind the scenes" history of how the Soviet Union did things as a program.

Lately I have been reading:

Studying Chess Made Easy
Silman's Complete Endgame Course
Chess tactics by Sierawan (just ok. Very basic.)
Chess openings for white by alburt et al

On the docket:
Logical Chess by chernev
The Game of Chess by Tarrasch (this is supposed to be on of the very best classic chess books.)
Chess openings for black by alburt et al.
Chess Fundamentals by Capablanca

Eta: this may not be what you are looking for though.

I'll whoop your arse a few dozen times and maybe some of my skill and intelligence will rub off on you

That's what everyone says. Lower level players need to concentrate mostly on tactics. To work on that I have been trying to do at least 10-20 tactics puzzles a day either using chess tempo or the chess.com app. I just find that it keeps things interesting if I jump around a little.

Also I wanted to learn just some very basic things about openings, so I'm not getting practice with a bad scenario. I only play 1. e4 as white. e5 as a response to kings pawn game as black. And the Indian in response to the Queens pawn game. That handles almost all games I play at my level. I'll worry about the rest of the opening theory later when I get a better grip on my tactics and basic strategic themes.

You probably need this
LINK