Improve Your Chess Now

Rating:
Summary: Overrated
Review: This book gets high praise from both amateur and professional chess players, but I found it not nearly as useful as John Nunn's Secrets of Practical Chess. Nunn's is the better book and thats all you really need to know. Tisdall rehashes various theoretical methods of calculating variations and choosing the "right" move, and provides so many examples its impossible to determine what material is really essential. My copy of Tisdall's book is 224 pages long and should have been edited down to quite a fewer number of pages. John Nunn's book is superior and covers much of the same material with a clearer writing style and essential examples of over-the-board faults and their remedy.

Rating:
Summary: Many original ideas - any one worth the price
Review: This book is valuable because it addresses many new ideas not treated in other chess books. These include training exercises to improve your calculations, unusual minority attacks (and minority attack defenses),and rook vs. two minor pieces.

Rating:
Summary: Perhaps the best chess book I own
Review: This is a gem of a book, packed with entertaining prose, which makes it readable, and a well-debugged method for learning how to think more effectively about chess. I own about 100 chess books -- how to manuals, game collections, openning theory, endgame treatises -- but this book has improved my play more than just about any other book. (Other favorites include, the Encyclopedia of Chess Middlegames, How to Reassess Your Chess, Zurich '56, and Tal-Botvinnik 1960) After reading this book, I began scoring much better against higher-rated players whom I have always struggled to beat. And, my victories felt like they required little effort. This book will improve your ability to calculate and to visualize the board. If you are rated below 1700, this book is probably too difficult. Try instead, Michael de la Maza's Rapid Chess Improvement and Silman's How to Reassess Your Chess. Also, you should work a lot of tactical problems daily.

Rating:
Summary: A great book!
Review: While I still have some way to go to achieve a Master rating, this is exactly the kind of book which may push me towards this aim. Tisdall combines a very enjoyable style of writing with a number of highly interesting ideas about improving in chess. He proposes a way to calculate variations which is certainly easier to follow than Kotov's and his suggestions on practicing blindfold play to improve the visualisation skills are certainly very helpful for the improving player. I have no doubt that any player above 1700 will benefit considerably from working through this book.