“The Luzhin Defense is far and away the best novel written about chess players. It deals with chess and madness, which is an intriguing topic, because it’s often said that chess grandmasters have a propensity to insanity. Statistically, it’s probably not true, but, nonetheless, people think about Fischer, they think about Steinitz, the first undisputed world champion who went insane, and there were others as well, such as Morphy and Rubinstein. The great mystery to me, which this book touches on, is that it’s often said that these people are driven mad by chess, when actually it might have been the other way around – chess was the only thing that kept them from going off the deep end. It’s when they get away from chess, or try to break away from it, that their characters disintegrate. Fischer’s lunacy, if that’s what it was, broke out in full force when he abandoned playing the game. Within chess he was sublimely rational. They are often people who can be slightly awkward outside chess, but in chess are completely balanced.” Read more...

The Best Books About Chess

Dominic Lawson, Journalist

“It’s just such a fantastic book for learning chess. I think sometimes adult improvers don’t pick this book up because of the title, and they should. It’s one of the best chess books I’ve ever read…The author is definitely a very experienced chess teacher…he’s a master player who clearly started focusing on teaching…Unlike other books which are just puzzles, it explains concepts and ideas really well, the examples are picked really nicely, he’s got a good mix. In chess, we divide it into three parts, you’ve got the opening, you’ve got the middle game and the end game. This book covers all of them, there are lots of bite-sized lessons. Within the book there are also puzzles, which are more interactive, more doable. Chess has its own language. There are all these terms and phrases chess players use which to the outside world make no sense at all. Coakley calls it ‘chess lingo.’ He explains all these terms and phrases, which is really useful for kids and parents. And there are lots of illustrations to make it more approachable, more friendly. My book is so tattered and dog-eared because I look at it all the time.” Read more...

Best Chess Books for Beginners

Andrew Green, Sportspersons & Sportswriter

“When I started getting really into chess I went to the chess book section in the public library and picked up this book, and I remember reading it on the bus home, I just couldn’t keep my eyes off it. There was a huge chess boom in the 1970s because of Bobby Fischer. He didn’t write this book, someone else wrote it and they put his name on it, and Fischer liked it. This book explains some concepts and ideas, and then gives you exercises based on those ideas. It’s like multiple choice, it’s a very interactive book. It’s a very, very good first chess book for trying to learn some basic ideas. I really enjoyed it, personally.” Read more...

Best Chess Books for Beginners

Andrew Green, Sportspersons & Sportswriter

“Sosonko was a Russian grandmaster and he emigrated, in 1972, to Holland. As someone who has left it behind, he gives extraordinarily deep, poignant, moving and personal accounts of the great chess players that he knew, people like Bronstein, Tal, Korchnoi, who really were part of a historical era…It’s about the extraordinary intellectual culture of these brilliant young men, who somehow focused on this game…Sosonko says that he is writing, in part, because players are dying or have died. He says that each time, after one of them passed away, he wanted to read about them. ‘Later, I realised that what I wanted to read about them was what I myself knew, which is why I’ve written this book.’ It’s a very good way of putting it. The book is translated from the Russian, but he writes beautifully, better than any other person who has written about the chess of the modern era. An attractive aspect of these two books is that although Sosonko was a very strong player and a grandmaster, they contain no moves at all. There are no games in them. They are purely biographical sketches. So anyone who doesn’t play chess but is interested in learning about the people who play chess – particularly in that period – can develop a very deep understanding of what it was about, the personality, the emotion and the character. There are also wonderful photographs from Sosonko’s private collection.” Read more...

The Best Books About Chess

Dominic Lawson, Journalist

“Satyajit Ray’s film made the story very accessible worldwide. It is about two royal courtiers’ obsession with the game of chess and they are so absorbed in the game they have no time to look at their state affairs or their king being deposed. In fact, the game of chess is played out when the British are annexing the empire of Awadh. Not even the sight of their king, Wajid Ali Shah, being dragged through the streets by English soldiers could divert the attention of the two players from their game. But they end up killing each other when one accuses the other of cheating.” Read more...

The best books on Sportsmanship and Cheating

Debanjan Chakrabarti,

“It’s not clear how much of this book was written by Fischer and how much was written by a grandmaster called Larry Evans, who was a friend of his and a very strong player. Nonetheless, officially, this is Fischer’s only game collection. The 60 games begin in 1957 and go up to 1967, so it’s only 10 years. What is very attractive about the book – apart from the fact that Fischer was such an extraordinary player and analyst – is the honesty of his comments. There was always a simplicity to Fischer which was seductive, even if at times it could also be very crude. Now one thinks of Fischer as someone who would never admit to any kind of error or weakness, but this book sprang from an earlier part of his life.” Read more...

The Best Books About Chess

Dominic Lawson, Journalist

“Bronstein was very nearly world champion. In 1951 he played a match that was drawn, and because he was the challenger, the titleholder Botvinnik kept the title. It was very controversial because Bronstein was one game ahead with two to play, and lost the penultimate game in rather strange circumstances. This was during the Stalinist period, and it was said that because he was distantly related to Trotsky, and his father had been in a gulag, the Soviet system didn’t want him to win. I don’t think he deliberately threw it, but he was under certain unusual pressures. Bronstein is a marvellous writer. He wrote the best books of the era, and this is by no means his only great book.” Read more...

The Best Books About Chess

Dominic Lawson, Journalist

“This is the most advanced book I have put on the list. It’s a good book for kids or adults who have been playing for a year or two and are starting to enter competitions. It’s got loads of practical advice, like how to beat players that are stronger than you, how to beat players that are weaker than you, how to manage your time when you’re playing in tournaments with chess clocks, how to get better at chess by studying by yourself… It’s also got loads of cool illustrations, which I loved as a kid. I’d say this book is for kids that are becoming a bit more serious and thinking about playing chess tournaments.” Read more...

Best Chess Books for Beginners

Andrew Green, Sportspersons & Sportswriter

“The Steps Method is for chess coaches and kids. It’s a Dutch curriculum, and it’s considered one of the best curriculums in the world. It is maybe a little bit out of date with all the electronic resources that are available, but it’s still very, very good. These workbooks go from complete beginner all the way up to master level. Basically, it’s a set of puzzles. But if you just buy your kid this for Christmas it’s not going to work. The way to get the most out of these books is you need a chess coach or chess teacher to explain the idea and then tell you “look, those are some exercises you can do, go solve them”. The chess teacher marks them and then they can see how you did. I think in the Netherlands, sometimes at chess clubs the coaches hand this out as homework. Some kids love it, they really like that approach. Some kids say, ‘No, this is a workbook, that’s like schoolwork. I’m not doing that.'” Read more...

Best Chess Books for Beginners

Andrew Green, Sportspersons & Sportswriter

“This one is actually more my students’ recommendation than mine. I have to admit I’ve never read this from cover to cover…but I have seen more than one kid coming to chess tournaments carrying this book everywhere they go, they absolutely love it. It’s an introduction to chess. It’s got lots of diagrams, it’s very, very visual. A bit like the first book I mentioned, Winning Chess Strategy for Kids, it covers a wide variety of topics: how to start your games, how to play in the middle, how to play at the end. I think it’s a great first or second chess book. It’s something that kids can dip into again and again, once they decide they really like chess and want to learn more.” Read more...

Best Chess Books for Beginners

Andrew Green, Sportspersons & Sportswriter

“Réti was a very strong player, who died at the age of 40, unfortunately. He once played 29 games simultaneously, blindfolded. He was a tremendous talent. His particular claim to fame is that he was a great theoretician, and invented his own opening, which still bears his name – the Réti opening. He was one of the leaders of a revolutionary philosophical movement in chess, called the hypermodern school. The hypermoderns overturned certain preconceptions which had become, perhaps, too rigidly adhered to, like the view that you had to occupy the centre at all costs. But this book, Masters of the Chessboard, isn’t a polemical work. It’s beautifully written. What Réti does is he looks at all the great chess players of the past, going back to the mid-19th century, up to his own time. He analyses the style of the individual players and explains what they brought to the game. You get a sense of their character and personality, also because he played a lot of these people in his short career.” Read more...

The Best Books About Chess

Dominic Lawson, Journalist

“Annie Duke…is an ex-professional poker player who got very interested in cognitive behavioural decision science. She tried to become an expert on how people make decisions and what her poker years could potentially teach her about it, and then she wrote this book, Thinking in Bets. In it, she compares poker to chess. She explains that chess is an information-complete game. The two players who look at the board know exactly what’s happening, they have all the information at their disposal, and they know the complete state of the world. Of course, they don’t know what the other player is thinking, but no information from the game is hidden. In poker, it’s the opposite. You know the cards you have in your hands, but most of the information is hidden. You don’t know what the other players around the table have in their hands and you don’t know the cards that are about to be revealed. It’s very much an information-incomplete game.” Read more...

The best books on Using Data to Understand the World

Edouard Mathieu,

“It’s a remarkable compendium of essays by the leading academics in the field, explaining how excellence is constructed in each of those areas. It is remarkably extensive, authoritative but also deeply entertaining. It covers everything from expertise in chess to expertise in psychology and computer science and mathematics. There is sexual expertise and medicine as well. Throughout all these different fields the consensus is the excellence is constructed on hard work but it nuances that explanation all the way through. For me it is a wonderful set of essays and required reading for anyone interested in the subject.” Read more...

The best books on Champions

Matthew Syed, Journalist