The Amateur's Mind, by Jeremy Silman » (Reviewed by Wil C. Fry)

Photo by Wil C. Fry. Cover design by Heidi Frieder

★★★★ (of 5)

Full Title: The Amateur’s Mind: Turning Chess Misconceptions Into Chess Mastery
Author: Jeremy Silman
Year: 1999 (mine was second edition trade paperback)
Pages: 426*
Genre: Chess
Publisher: Siles Press
ISBN 1-890085-02-2
Author’s Wikipedia page

(* 426 pages does not include preface or glossary)

The idea of this book is simple enough: International Master Jeremy Silman played games against his students and asked them to explain their thinking at each stage of the game — so he could “get inside the student’s head”, after which “I was soon seeing problems that I never imagined they possessed.” He takes us through those amateur misconceptions in this book and explains why they are misconceptions, showing the serious player how to get past them, hopefully to “mastery” of the game.

Interestingly, Silman begins the book with a heavy first chapter that almost made me put it down. I made several penciled notes in the margins, questioning whatever didn’t make sense to me. Silman concluded the chapter with: “At first these ideas will not make sense...” (page 6) and suggests feeding advanced concepts even to beginners, so the ideas can at least percolate until we can understand them. Then he backslid to much simpler ideas in the next chapter and built the framework so that by the end I could go back and understand (most of) chapter one.

The previous books I’ve read about chess (see the list) were too simple (like Moore’s How To Beat Anyone At Chess or Fischer’s Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess); this one was exactly what I needed at this stage of my chess development. I learned how to spot and evaluate imbalances in chess positions, the relative value of knights versus bishops at different stages of the game, the difference between a “bad” bishop and a “good” bishop, and the meaning of several chess terms like “weak square” and “backward pawn” and how to take advantage of them.

The diagrams and move lists in the book are from real games, often from Silman’s own students, but sometimes from his games and other times from other masters (as opposed to made-up puzzles or fantasy positions created for the book). The book uses the now-standard algebraic notation for chess moves, though sometimes in the text Silman will revert to an older style “b2-b4” (instead of simply “b4”) Unlike a few other chess books I’ve read, the diagrams in this one were crystal clear and easy to read.

Near the end, there were 26 quiz positions, which the reader is supposed to evaluate and solve, and then flip back to the solutions to see how well one did. I didn’t do as well as I’d hoped, but better than I expected — and certainly better than I would have done before reading this book.

There were a couple of downsides which kept it from being perfect. For one, there were several typographical errors, which are always distracting. And I found at least one mistake in a diagram — on page 318, white has a pawn on a4, but the explanation (pages 351-357) makes it clear that white didn’t move the a-pawn until some time after the position that was supposed to be in the diagram.

Most irritating of all was Silman’s disparaging remarks about chess computers. Granted the book is more than 20 years old, but even in the late 1990s, chess computers were improving the point where few humans could defeat them. (It was 1997 when IBM’s Deep Blue defeated world champion Garry Kasparov in a six-game match, and just a few years later when PC-based systems could do the same.) On page 214, Silman berates chess computers in a way that reminded me of the guy in the 1890s who scoffed that the automobile would never replace the horse for human transportation. On pages 279-280, he rants and rages about a mistake in a particular game, going so far as to theorize that the player was drunk or a victim of “demonic possession”. But Stockfish 14 (which can easily defeat Silman) says the move in question was the absolute best move in the position.

After that, I began checking certain positions with Stockfish as I read. Most of the time, the computer agreed with Silman’s assessment — or at least didn’t violently disagree, but there were numerous occasions when the computer suggests the very moves that Silman calls “mistakes”. This, after his hearty denunciation of chess computers, took away some of the book’s authority.

Conclusion

I think that reading this book — and working through most of the positions on a physical chess board, not to mention checking with online analysis engines — has helped me improve my chess. There are solid concepts here that every chess student should learn relatively early, things I was never aware of until this book. (But it’s not for beginners. Someone just learning should first try the other books I linked to above first, and play a few hundred games before trying this one.) It was good enough and helpful enough that I purchased a second Silman book, which is next on my reading list.