JohnG wrote on 06/14/15 at 18:56:17:


Well, the examples in Euwe/Kramer and Pachman have a fair amount of commentary, but it's all relative – someone like Silman would be even more wordy, Nunn might give much more (and more correct) analysis, and people like Dvoretsky, Kasparov and Stohl might go overboard with both explanations and analysis...

The explanations may not do a large part of the lifting in terms of actual chess improvement, but they can certainly have motivational value - I know that I'm more likely to go trough most or all of a book if I'm enjoying myself in the process. 

And with very sparse annotation I'm always wondering if this was just a conscious didactic choice by the author, or more of a lazy shortcut. There is a point at which annotations become so sparse that a database dump of relevant games would serve just as well.

Pawn Power in Chess is simply great. Never had as much fun with a chess book. 

Btw: Euwe is didactically better, Pachman is more work, from what I read from them. But Euwe is more outdated. I should have read it in my youth. Today I would search something more up to date. Chess books are much better these days, except some classics.

Thanks for the feedback.  I agree that annotated games are a great way to learn positional ideas and I've been through many that you mention.  I enjoy both kinds of books, specific middlegame primers as well as game collections.  I also agree that there are a variety of other good books on this topic.

Rather than getting into a rehash of what already exists in many places on the internet around best books and how to learn strategy or positional play, I'm just hoping someone with reasonable experience with both books could comment on how the target audience ratings of these two might compare.

From reading reviews of both and a short opportunity to glance at the Euwe and Kramer books, I'm thinking the Euwe's books are a bit more advanced, but am hoping someone that has spent more time with them could provide insight.

Regards.

I am not really answering the question as asked. Sorry about that.

I just want to say that you should consider whether or not you really need to or want to read this type of book in the first place. For some time I believed that it was necessary to read one of these books/series. I tried Nimzo's My System and then Pachman's Modern Chess Strategy (the abridged version of the three volumes you are interested in). I didn't finish either and felt that I was working hard to learn fairly little (much of the work involves wading through tedious categorization, nomenclature, and other pointless stuff).

I really picked up most of these ideas from anthologies of lightly annotated games. For example, Chernev's Logical Chess and Most Instructive Games; Giddins' 50 Essential Chess Lessons; McDonald's Chess: The Art of Logical Thinking; Marovic's Understanding Pawn Play in Chess. These authors also have other books in the same style that I have not read but that are probably just as good.

The nice thing about books of this sort is that they are fun, easy, and quick to read. For example, I went through the Giddins book in a couple of days (though I was already 1800 when I read it). I suspect you get all the same information from these books that you do from those horrible encyclopaedic works, and you never have to learn such tedious things as the 12 types of weak pawns, the 17 varieties of bad bishops, or the 34 phases of a correctly executed kingside attack. At a certain point I get sick of being told that White has a second category good bishop which is actually not a very good piece in the present position (but which still meets the criteria for a second category good bishop), while Black's bishop is a fourth category bad bishop, though quite a good piece in the present position. The naming and classifying of things seems to eclipse actual chess at a certain point in these books and I just don't see the point of it all. 

Sorry for being off-topic and ranting. Hopefully someone else can tell you about the books you really wanted to know about...