I quite like DVDs though the content i s far less than a book and they are pricey you do actually get to go through all the material, and while I keep the books for reference with a DVD once I've watched them a couple of times I feel comfortable in selling them secondhand on Ebay/Amazon.

I agree they could do a bit more rehearsal or editing sometimes.

Speaking of DVDs, does anyone have Mueller's endgame ones?  If so, do you have a sense of what level they are aimed at?  I was thinking of maybe getting the one on rook endings, but am worried it might be a bit too basic.

drkodos wrote on 02/20/09 at 05:53:39:


All very good points, but there's something nice about a very low energy introduction to chess ideas. It might not always be convenient to have a chess set with you, but a laptop and one of the better dvd's are great for commutes or an introduction to an opening that you are unsure of. Admittedly the price makes these excellent casual uses more problematic.

Norwood's book on Anand which came out around 95 was really poor and superficial,  mostly just rambling from Norwood.

Schillers Book on the Stonewall Dutch, Garbage just a database dump no explanation whatsoever.

Quote:

That's a bit excessive, there are some very good ones (depending on what you are looking for). The endgame series is nice if you want to improve your endgames, the Aagaard NID/QID repetoire series is good, the Andy Martin Czech Benoni one is good and at least some of King's Powerplay series is nice. Of course you could question whether you get enough value for money given that the contents are of course less than what you would get with a book or one of the "old-fashioned" Chessbase opening CDs. On the other hand the good ones are a bit like a series of lectures by strong players, which is of course beneficial. I find that in the Shirov and Kazim DVDs that I have seen the presentation was quite dry and unengaging (a problem you never have with Andy Martin, but in exchange on some of his works his analysis is just too light, maybe the target audience is much weaker than me, or it's just trying to get something out quickly).

In fact some of the old opening CDs (without multimedia) were very poor lacking explanations, structure, organzation or any sort of guidance (even the content wise very, very good CD by Marin on the Catalan suffered somewhat by the organsiation of the material).

Coming back to books, I just looked at my bookshelf and discovered "Flank Openings" by Ray Keene and "How to Play the Caro-Kann defense" by Ray Keene and Shaun Taulbut, two books that I think are very bad and did not help me, at all. On the other hand next to that (just ot be fair to Keene), there's "The English Defence ...e6, ...b6, ...Bb7" by Keene, Plaskett and Tisdall, which is a really good book with a lot of useful analysis, interesting ideas, which I keep checking when someone has proposed yet another supposed refutation of the English Defence.

winawer77 wrote on 02/18/09 at 11:56:58:

Are you referring to any particular DVDs? Nice to know which ones to avoid as my (limited) experience to date has been rather the opposite.

kylemeister wrote on 02/17/09 at 19:02:58:



see here:  http://www.chesscafe.com/text/fishben.txt

I seem to recall a story involving Benko punching Fischer, or something like that.  I suppose someone here will know what I am thinking of.