Chess for Zebras [Kindle Edition]

You love chess and you want to improve your skills. You see an interesting chess book. You buy it. Nothing really happens with your game..

Sound familiar?
So is this yet another promosing-but-will-languish-at-your-bookshelf-chess-book? Not at all!

The best books make you think and this certainly makes you think a lot (and not only about chess). It will not improve your game as per see, but it will make you think about improving your game in new ways. Buying this book means you can take a few years pause before even considering buying another chess book - the material covered is vast in scope and rich in ideas even though its "only" about 250 pages. The ideas-to-pages ratio must be the highest I have ever seen in a chess book!

The only thing you should be aware of though is that I would not recommend this book to chess beginners - it is too complex and abstract if you have just played chess for a year or two (or less) I think.

Frankly, I do not see how a chess player can be disappointed by this book. Highly highly recommended - though I reckon adult players will gain the most from the book.

Some authors are better at writing than others and Jonathan Rowson is up there among the very best. This book is a genuine pearl and should have a place in your chess book treasury. I speedily read through "The 7 Deadly Chess Sins" and have not paced down with this "Chess For Zebras". What you get here is really a continuing investigation in the why-do-we-act/play-the-way-we-do? that was begun with "7 deadly chess sins". And again Rowson is showing us by way of example how chess players make blunders, pursue wrong strategies or simply fail to live up to the tension at the appropriate moments. The examples are discussed in lenght - from the critical (or interesting) position the moves are usually explained in great lenght which is really beneficial for understanding many middle game strategy concepts. From these examples alone you are bound to learn a lot. But the real beauty of Rowson - from my point of view - is that he combines the chess part with an insight into human behaviour and human thought processes. And as he did in "7 deadly chess sins" here too he offers many advices and intriguing information that I personally found profoundly interesting. I cannot help compare him to Yermolinsky (whose book "The Road to Chess Improvement" comes highly recommended) - Yermolinsky is the practician and Rowson the academic. Both are really good at choosing examples that are realistic chess battles and therefore highly rewarding to study.

This book talks about chess players. How they think, how they react, what are their feelings that ultimately affect the way they play chess. The author shares his experience regarding these matters with the ultimate goal to help the player be cooler while playing chess. Lot's of games of famous Grandmasters are analysed in which the author tries to illustrate his ideas. This "emotional" perspective of chess play which is being analysed is very humorous at times, especially when the cooler-minded approach of Grandmasters is contrasted to the greatly emotional approach of most amateurs. The book in general tries to help the player by informing him about the emotional pitfalls of the game so that he can remain cool from start to finish of a chess game. What seems strange nevertheless, is that although the purpose of the book is to teach calmness it is written in a very enthusiastic - novel like way with expressions like "Wow!" being common. This is a very poor choice by the author since this works towards the opposite direction of the book's purpose. This choice, in combination with the humourous nature of some of the author's observations on chess players, makes the whole work have more of an entertaining than an instructive value. Overall, I'd say that the book contains good material but this material is poorly presented.