How To Reassess Your Chess by Jeremy Silman is a classic chess book that is on the top of many recommendation lists and I must say it lives up to the hype.

I love Silman’s writing style. It is easy to understand, his analogies are great and his sense of humor is refreshing, especially as soaking up all the chess goodness in this book takes some serious brain energy.

This book is not short. It comes in at 652 pages when you include the puzzles and answers.

I spent five months reading the book. I broke it down into two chapters a month and that was manageable. This was my “read without a board” book, so I didn’t set up any positions. I relied on the diagrams and focused on understanding the main idea. I would try and guess the correct move based on the concept that was being taught. Because I didn’t use a board I stuck to the main lines and didn’t go through many variations.

Who is this book for?

My rating is in the 1800-2000 range and there was plenty to learn. Some concepts felt like revision, but there were also ideas that I learnt for the first time. I would say this book is great for people in the 1000-2200 range. If you are on the lower end of the rating scale you may need to work harder to understand everything, but Silman is a great communicator and most people should be able to gain something from this book.

What score would I give it?

I can nearly give this top marks. I would have liked slightly more diagrams (but this would have made the book even longer) and I would have liked the test answers immediately after the problems, as I was reading electronically it would have been nice not to have to jump to the end of the book to get the answers. I tended not to check the answers because of this reason.

I  give this book a score of 9/10