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Amateurs at large

If you can't learn something from a game, you're doing something wrong. These are the words of adult improver extraordinaire Neal Bruce in an interview on Chess Dojo. For most people, learning from games means studying master games. But what about games played by amateurs? This review covers a book that aims to extract important lessons from amateur games.

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What can you expect from this book?

I first came across Dan Heisman's writing through his blog on chess.com. This must have been about 5 years ago. I was impressed by the large number of suggestions that are relevant for amateur players (patzers like us). And when I started to explore his bibliography, there was one book that quickly made it to my wishlist: The World's Most Instructive Amateur Game Book. (a.k.a the chess book with the longest title ever). And after several years, I finally got around to reading it.

The basic principle of the book is that you take a number of games played between amateurs and add some comments and suggestions from an instructor's perspective. Heisman highlights the mistakes that are made and aims to turn each of them into a small lesson that the reader (hopefully) will learn something from.

The book has five chapters with separate themes:
  1. Playing too fast
  2. Playing too slow
  3. Misplaying the endgame
  4. "Variety of instructive play"
  5. Decisive tactical mistakes
As usual, the publisher has put out an excerpt from the book, where you can see the table of contents (with proper chapter titles) along with a sample game.

This is a quite large book. It covers 30 games and has more than 300 pages. This means that each game is given about 10 pages on average, which is quite extensive. There are several reasons for the large number of pages per game.

The annotations obviously account for the majority of the contents, and they contain many different things. Obviously, the moves are presented along with the usual annotation symbols you would expect from any book (?? ! +- etc.) . You also get alternative lines for the substandard moves. Quite ordinary, so far. However, in addition to this, the time stamps from the games are included, which allows you to see how much time is spent for each move. Heisman uses this quite extensively, along with comments on whether or not the time management is reasonable. Spoiler alert: Usually it is not (which is indicated by the names of the two first chapters). Finally, the annotations also include computer evaluations and comments on the computer moves.

It seems that Heisman tries to cover it all in this book; openings, middlegames, endings, tactics, general principles etc. In my opinion, the combination of ordinary annotations along with comments on time management and computer evaluations makes it a bit too much. My impression is that the main message tends to be a bit muffled because of the large amount of information. Also, I feel that Heisman is a bit too heavy on the computer evaluations at times. In several games, he presents the computer's top moves without even attempting an explanation. I am having a hard time seeing the value of this.

This being said, the book has its fair share of upsides. You will find numerous examples of established principles and rules of thumb that can guide your decision making (but only in chess, not IRL). If you've read other publications by Heisman (books and articles), you'll probably recognize a great deal. The principles and recommendations are the same as you will find in his book A guide to chess improvement. What sets the game collection book apart from his other work is that you get a presentation of established principles (e.g. "move your rooks to open files") in a game context, and usually with a clear example of what happens when you don't follow said principles. The principles are often presented in italics or a grey text box, which makes them stick out from the rest of the text and thereby easy to find if you're just flipping through the pages or looking for something you've already read. Heisman also gives reading recommendations in conjunction with the game annotations, which can make it easier to find the books that correspond to your particular needs. For me, this is the main takeaway from the book.

Heisman has put up av youtube video where he goes through one of the games in the book. I think the video gives a fairly good idea about what the book is all about and how the games are presented. So if you like the video, you'll probably enjoy the book as well.

Who should read this book?

This is a book that is mainly geared towards beginners. It can also be useful for some intermediate players, if you want to sure up your foundation. In the video referenced above, Heisman says the book should be useful for players in the range 1100 to 2200. In my opinion, that may be a bit high. I think that most players rated 1800 and above will already be familiar with most of the stuff in the book.

About this book

Author:Dan Heisman
Title:The World's Most Instructive Amateur Game Book
Type of book:Chess improvement, Game collection
Level:Beginner/Intermediate
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