Principles of the New Chess

This is an excellent book for a beginner like me. I started from going through some of the simple rules. Picked up the Dummy book which made sense. But there were so many emphases on the end games and tactics. I am in the process of going through the Idiot's book and doing its exercises, and believe me they are long and take me hours each chapter. Then, I came across this book. It teaches from the first step to the end of the game.I absorbed enough theories on the tactics from both the Dummy and Idiot's books, that each move and the annotations made perfect sense to me. It put all the tactical throries together into an actual working game, not just pieces of tactics.Pandolfini is an excellent teacher. He started by explaining what are the available moves and evaluated the pros and cons of each move using both a broad and a more focus perspectives. He probed readers to justify the moves by asking a check list of questions. In another word, he trained the reader to think and to analyze, but be flexible. If you are a seasoned player like the other reviewers and had read many chess books, you might find it boring. Selecting this one game out of millions of excellent games is ludicrous. But if you are a beginner and wanted a good game clearly explained to you, this is the book for you.

This is an excellent book for a beginner like me. I started from going through some of the simple rules. Picked up the Dummy book which made sense. But there were so many emphases on the end games and tactics. I am in the process of going through the Idiot's book and doing its exercises, and believe me they are long and take me hours each chapter. Then, I came across this book. It teaches from the first step to the end of the game.I absorbed enough theories on the tactics from both the Dummy and Idiot's books, that each move and the anotations made perfect sense to me. It put all the tactical throries together into an actual working game, not just pieces of tactics.Pandolfini is an excellent teacher. He started by explaining what are the available moves and evaluated the pros and cons of each move using both a broad and a more focus perspectives. He probed readers to justify the moves by asking a check list of questions. In another word, he trained the reader to think and to anylize, but be flexible. If you are a seasoned player like the other reviewers and had read many chess books, you might find it boring. Selecting this one game out of millions of excellent games is ludicrous. But if you are a beginner and wanted a good game clearly explained to you, this is the book for you.