Studying Micheal Stean's Simple Chess

Reading chess books

I've been playing chess for almost a year and I've never read a chess book. This will be a series of blog posts where I try to change that.

Simple Chess

Simple Chess by Micheal Stean is a classic short introduction to positional chess. The Perpetual Chess Podcast recommends it for players rated 1300-1900 and Jonathan Brian posted a study companion on his blog. It mostly consists of complete games between grandmasters which Stean has annotated to illustrate strategic ideas across seven chapters.

1. Introduction
2. Outposts
3. Weak pawns
4. Open files
5. Half-open files
6. White and Black Squares
7. Space

jomega has produced a study containing all of the games from the new algebraic edition.

The Plan

Based on Jonathan's example the plan is to play through 2 games a week and post the games and my thoughts every Wednesday and Saturday. The goal is to finish the book, the games will still be there to re-read after my chess skills have improved, so the commitment is 20 minutes per game.