The Art of Positional Play in Chess

This is an underrated classic. Suitable for a prodigy or an average older person looking for some interesting games presented by a great player. I had this book years ago and lost it in a move. I would prefer to give this book 5 stars (I am surprised at the small number of reviews and the mediocre rating). However, the book as advertised was a good used hardback. I received a good used paperback. This would not prevent me from buying from the seller again.

This book looks like they did a scan of a previous printing and used that scan to print this one: the fonts are a bit grainy and, worse, the chess diagrams are near unreadable in places, especially where black chessmen sit on dark squares.

This book holds a place of honor in my library. Sadly, I left the book on the train going to work many years ago. When I saw the listing for this book, my heart jumped!!One cannot help but learn from it even when one simply says wades through it!

Once in a while, at some point in the depths of a chess book, it occurs to me that, "this might be the only chess book I would need, if I could keep only one." Despite the nightmarish vision of a world in which you were allowed only one chess book, my point is that this work on positional play by Reshevsky is such a book for me. I will summarize a few reasons why it is one of my all-time favorite chess books: 1) Brilliant games, many of them very long, with endgames. Many of the games are over 60 moves long. The annotations do not bog you down, though, so you do get through the games. Reshevsky brilliantly points out themes at various points, and you naturally start to see it as you go through the games; 2) annotations that are concise, and dead-on the point. Each annotation seems to relate to the ideas inherent in the position. There are variations as necessary to flesh out ideas. The annotations are very instructive. They remind me of Fischer's in 60 Memorable Games, but from a d4 type player instead; 3) the book in effect presents an entire opening repertoire, basically Reshevsky's. This means that you play 1. d4 with white and the Sicilian (he normally played the accelerated dragon or the Najdorf; I have settled on the accelerated dragon). There are a lot of games where Reshevsky is white defeating a King's Indian. These games alone are worth the price of admission for me, as I often face the King's Indian. For these reasons and more, this is one of my favorite books. It is true that there are numerous typos in the book, but it has not bothered me. Normally, it is clear what was meant, and I just write the proper number or letter over in pen. I have the older McKay edition, which is very nicely formatted, with diagrams in well-thought out places. I really love this book a lot.

I'm referring to the McKay algebraic paperback edition here. I like the book a lot, it has some real nice games, some nice annotations, and the games are organized by theme and illustrate the concepts greatly.In fact, i might give the book 3/5 or 4/5 if it were not for the errors. There is atleast one error in every game i've looked at. I don't know if the errors exist in the original or if the problem was the conversion to algebraic, but it's really a problem.You've almost got to get the games from the internet just to follow the book, since the score in the book is so full of errors. Based on the errors I see, I suspect it's a matter of conversion to algebraic, and the problems probably do not exist in the descriptive edition, but that's just a guess. Almost makes me want to get the descriptive edition and find out...but not quite.

It is true that Sammy was one of the strongest chess players of the western hemisphere for many, many years, but it is not true that this book has a very helpful format.The book relies too much on sparsely annotated games. I simply don't recommend it, as it essentially just gives a list of pithy chunks of advice followed by games that illustrate the advice. The problem is that even moderately strong players understand many concepts without realizing when to apply them (or when they are to be overruled) in standard play. This text gives little insight into these issues.