bicycle wrote on 02/24/12 at 03:47:30:

Learn from the Legends is a great book but really dense with information. Marin does an awesome job (perhaps the best I've seen) at presenting big trees of variations in a compelling way, but they're still big trees of variations.

All of Giddins' books (except perhaps How to Build Your Chess Opening Repertoire, which is fine but kind of specialized) are really super and targeted at exactly your level. He knows just how much information to present to be useful without being overwhelming.

Thanks for the thoughts, suggestions and encouragement, I appreciate them.  

Funny that you mention Reinfeld dfan, I've enjoyed the Capablanca games I've played over thus far so much that I've already been looking for another collection of his games to add to CBCE and, I was a little surprised to learn that Reinfeld still seems to be the best general collection of Capablanca games available in english.

The Life & Games of Akiva Rubinstein: Volume 1: Uncrowned King by Donaldson is also in the cart, so to speak (though I'm not sure at what rating it would be wise to read it).   

The reviews of Marin' Learn from the Legends and  Giddins' 50 Essential Chess Lessons were pretty compelling.  I've added them to my list.

A quote from Alias' excellent link earlier in the thread:  

"...there is something mysterious about his play, no one else could cope with things like he did. It is easier for me to talk about Karpov because his collection of games was my first chess book. I studied his work when I was a child, later I played quite a few games against him. He is a versatile chess player, a good tactician who brilliantly calculates lines and positionally very strong. He also has a distinctive feature. Funnily enough, he has effectively denied Steinitz's pronouncement: if you have an advantage you must attack, otherwise, you will lose it. When having an edge, Karpov often marked time and still gained the advantage! I don't know anyone else who could do that, it's incredible. I was always impressed and delighted by this skill. When it looked like it was high time to start a decisive attack, Karpov played a3, h3, and his opponent's position collapsed."             Kramnik on Karpov

http://www.kramnik.com/eng/interviews/getinterview.aspx?id=61   

The first player I studied for the endgame was Rubinstein. 

There's an excellent book by Marin, Learn from the Legends , which won the Chess Cafe book of the year award in 2005. He covers some of the great endgame players of all time in a very entertaining fashion.

You certainly can't go wrong with Capablanca, have fun!

bicycle wrote on 04/12/11 at 23:44:05:


It is more instructive to study games annotated by the player themselves, with detailed annotations explaining their thought processes and placing them under close scrutiny. Yasser Seirawan's 'Chess Duels' is a glowing example of such a book. 

As for Karpov vs. Kramnik - if you don't study both you really are missing out as far as your chess development is concerned.

I have the utmost respect and admiration for Karpov's chess, and I know that he played some beautiful attacking games.  However, I don't think I'm alone in finding his moves very difficult to understand.  He probably plays more moves that I don't understand than any other top player, and I remember reading in multiple books that many strong GMs feel the same way.  One was an English GM and I think one was Bareev in one of Dvoretsky's books, but I can't remember.  Actually I feel like I only really understand Karpov's games when Dvoretsky explains them to me (most of them, that is).  I have Karpov's own book on his best games and found that I didn't really learn anything from it.

Edit: Here's a quote from GM Howell's Essential Chess Endings: "I don't think there was anything wrong with approaching the rook immediately with 3...Kd5 but when I'm playing through a Karpov game I can only ever predict about 10% of the moves."

So for an improving player, I'd recommend some other "positional" player, like Smyslov.  I actually don't seem to learn a lot from game collections of modern top players (I have Kramnik's Life and Games, for instance), but I've learned a tremendous amount from Smyslov, Taimanov, Bronstein, etc.  Those games often resemble a little more closely the games that we sub-IM players play; we don't have our openings worked out to move 25, etc. 

bicycle wrote on 04/12/11 at 23:44:05:


In my opinion for a typical player Kramnik's active positional style would be make a much more approachable role model than Karpov.

However, there are probably much more well analysed Karpov games out there - Mednis's book or Kasparov's MGP 5 and the Kv K matches.  THe Karolyi book on Karpov's endgame in pretty thorough too.ANd you can learn prophlaxis from Tolya.

  I really enjoyed the Kramnik Chessbase DVD as well as Khalifmans ORATK.

Paddy wrote on 04/14/11 at 10:00:06:


All fine, but the original poster asked about Karpov and Kramnik and he didn't state his rating. Can't we just answer questions without lecturing?