How To Beat Anyone At Chess, by Ethan Moore

Photo by Wil C. Fry

★★★ (of 5)

Full Title: How To Beat Anyone At Chess: The Best Chess Tips, Moves, & Tactics To Checkmate
Author: Ethan Moore
Year: 2015 (mine was 2015 trade paperback)
Pages: 247*
Genre: Instructional
Publisher: Adams Media (Simon & Schuster)
ISBN 978-1-4405-9214-0 (trade paperack)

(* 247 pages includes both title pages, the copyright page, the table of contents, the introduction, and both appendices, but not the index)

Summary

This poorly titled book is by Ethan Moore, who is, according to his author page at Simon & Schuster’s website, “a chess enthusiast and writer from Connecticut” (that’s it; there is nothing more about Moore on the entire internet). This alone should have raised my suspicions before purchasing the book; it’s difficult to find any real person who has such little information about them online, much less an author trying to sell books.

The book itself is about the world of chess and how to play chess.

The Good

The design of the book was well done, with pleasant fonts, aesthetically placed white space, clearly printed diagrams (as opposed to the obfuscated ones in the Bobby Fischer book). Even the pages felt pleasant to turn. I sincerely want to congratulate the team at the publishing house that designed this book — they all deserve raises.

The parts about chess were accurate and clearly spelled out, though very often said in the longest possible way. I think someone who had never played chess before could read this book and gain a solid understanding of the game and how it’s played. Besides the “how to play chess” parts, there are info-bits about the history of the game, mini-bios of some of the most famous players, as well as descriptions of tournament play, how the game switched from mostly occurring in chess clubs to mostly occurring in tournaments to mostly occurring online.

I like that Moore used the more progressive “she” and “her” for the generic third person instead of the more traditional but sexist “he” and “him”. This might seem like a small change for writers or publishers to make, and next to pointless. However, the outcry it raises among regressives is proof enough that it’s necessary.

The Disappointing

Before I even opened it, I automatically took off a point for the clickbait nature of the title. Though I hadn’t heard of “Ethan Moore” before, I knew for a fact that he was not a world chess champion or even a grandmaster (I did actually perform this search before buying the book). In other words, if Ethan Moore knew how to beat literally anyone at chess, he should have been on those lists. Ergo, he cannot possibly have written a book that explains how to beat anyone at chess.

After reading the book, I think a more accurate title would have been “How To Play Chess”, or “Chess: Rules, History, and More”. If the publishers really wanted the “How To Beat...” part in the title, the rest should have been “...Someone At Chess”. There is nothing in this book that will help a chess player beat anyone beyond the novice level.

Moore puts the lie to his title with an explicit sentence later in the book:

“If you do decide to get serious about chess and wish to become a strong player or a champion, you will need to devote many years of striving to master the game.”
—pages 201-202

I took off another entire point for the overly lengthy description of the rules of the game and description of the pieces. Chapter 1 (“The Board And The Pieces”) begins on page 15, and Moore doesn’t finish explaining how the game is played until page 68 — the end of Chapter 3 (“En Passant And Other Special Moves”). Look, the rules of chess can easily fit on a single page; I know this because I have purchased chess boards that list all the rules on a single typed page. (Granted, with white space, illustrations, a pleasantly spaced font, it might stretch to three or four pages. Maybe even ten if you think certain rules need more clarification or explanation.) Anyone who uses more than 40 pages to explain the rules of chess is just padding their book.

(There is a “however” for the previous paragraph, however. Intermingled between the rules and explanations are some principles and ideas about the way the game should be played, things that come in handy later. I think a beginner would find these helpful. There are also informative insets about the history of the game, the way the pieces and their uses have changed over time, etc.)

Even knowing the title was clickbait before I opened the book, I still expected something to show up that would boost my game. Perhaps there would be a some tactical advice or a list of strategies or traps. I am, after all, still a novice. (Even after playing for many years, I never began to study the game until now; even a beginner’s book ought to have something for me. But even the more “advanced” chapters were things I already knew. For example, the “special attacks” listed in Chapter 7 were things I have already learned by watching the video chess lessons on Chess.com. (These are not advanced techniques, but very basic maneuvers that I knew years ago; I only learned what they’re called by watching the Chess.com lessons: double attack, fork, discovered attack, discovered defense, discovered check, double check, pin, and skewer.) Perhaps the only thing I did learn from this book was the principle explained on pages 95-96: “When cramped, exchange pieces; when controlling space, avoid exchanges.” That’s something I hadn’t considered before, but it makes sense.

There are also a handful of mistakes or typographical errors that might confuse a beginner. For example, the caption on page 90 says: “White plays 16.Qb8+! 17.NXb8 Rd8 checkmate”, but this is impossible for a couple of reasons due to the typographical error that put the “17.” in the wrong place. It should read: 16.Qb8+! Nxb8 17.Rd8# Another example: on page 116, Moore says that 2...e6 is the classical way to decline the Queen’s Gambit (which is true), but then he adds: “This protects the e5 pawn”, which doesn’t make sense because there is no pawn at e5 in this stage of the game. (He must mean the d5 pawn.) On page 127, he lists a series of moves as an example of “a trap that shows how important such knowledge is” (knowledge about discovered attacks), but when I played out those moves on the board, there was no example of a discovered attack. I added penciled notes to these spots throughout the book in case an actual beginner gets this book after me, when I donate it.

Conclusion

I think this would be a swell book for someone just starting out in chess, who maybe has never played before, doesn’t know the rules (or doesn’t know them very well), or has trouble remembering the difference between checkmate and stalemate or what en passant means. It could probably do a better job reaching that specific audience if it had a more accurate title. Instead, it’s going to reach people like me, who are a bit ahead of that stage and looking for the next level of chess instruction, and we’re all going to be disappointed.