Book review: Best Lessons of a Chess Coach (Weeramantry & Eusebi, 1994)

Introduction

Best Lessons of a Chess Coach (Weeramantry & Eusebi, 1994) is an instructionally oriented game collection. The book is divided into four sections (A: Outpost squares; B: Weak squares; C: The initiative; D: Coordination and control).

Each section is further divided into lessons (thoroughly analyzed games that demonstrate important points on the section's topic) and illustrative games (sparsely analyzed games, usually focusing on a key moment after simply listing the first 20-30 moves). There is a total of 12 lessons and 48 illustrative games, which is obviously quite a bit to go through!

The lessons include exercises mostly in the form of questions (e.g. "16.Nd5 is a blunder. Why?") with answers at the end of the chapter, and plenty of prose, often in the form of a question-and-answer dialogue. Each lesson ends with a list of generalizable key takeaways from the game, e.g. "Connect your rooks; they work best together.", "Before taking active operations, improve the position of your pieces." and "Do not hold onto pawns at all costs; it is better to let one go to secure active play.".

This review will be on the Mongoose Press "extended edition", which is pictured in the blog posts's title image.

You can find a fairly lengthy sample on the book's Amazon page.

The good

Best Lessons's style is simple and powerful. He communicates the gist of the position in a clear and unprententious tone, and makes excellent and generally applicable points. Obviously a great deal of coaching experience is behind this work, and its clarity puts the writings of some much stronger players to shame.

Besides, there are some very instructive games in here! Smyslov — Rudakovsky 1945 might be a cliche, but it's a cliche every growing chess player should know. The game selection encompasses a very long period, from Paul Morphy himself to even a game between Leela and Stockfish.

The book is quite prose- and diagram-happy, and mostly readable without a board with a bit of visualization skill. There are also "partial diagrams" that demonstrate patterns in the abstract. I quite liked the idea, and honestly chess literature could benefit from demonstrating ideas without always having them be in the context of a full game — even here it's a shame there aren't more of these diagrams. You can find one in the Amazon sample linked above.

The book feels quite solid physically (though admittedly a couple of pages have come loose on my copy), and the general print layout is visually clear and pleasant.

The bad

My primary issue with the book is the number of games in kingside fianchetto systems and other hypermodern and/or slightly sketchy openings, maybe due to the author's own affinity for them.

If you're a huge fan of putting your bishop on g2 or g7 and giving up the center, the book might be exactly what you're looking for, but that's really not how I think most beginners and club players should be playing and learning chess. Had the book stuck just a bit more to classical openings and structures, I would have no reservations with recommending it to almost everyone to call themselves a club player.

Sections A and B felt like they blended together, as do C and D. Outposts and weak squares mostly fall into the same category (after all, the best way to abuse a weak square is to, you know, put a piece on it...) and strong initiatives often require, well, strong coordination. This is likely pointless nitpickery, but as things stand, the sections feel a bit pointless.

The lessons in section C (the initiative) delve a bit too much into tactical details. I appreciate that they are very relevant to the position at hand, but honestly I don't think they are very universally applicable, especially in a book mostly focusing on positional play.

The cover art is... well, it's no 100 Endgames You Must Know, I'll say this much. I don't really understand why it's so intensely difficult for chess writers to find non-fugly covers for their books after all that work, but surely we can do better.

In conclusion...

It's a great book! I feel obligated to (again) bring up all of the hypermodern games as a very real downside but there isn't much to dislike beyond that (and the cover art...), and it might be an upside to some people anyway.

There is a lot of competition in the "teach club Patzers to play passable positional chess" space, but this is a book that I find myself recommending fairly often to people in the ~1600-2000 (Lichess rapid) range. it certainly has use beyond that, but at some point gets overtaken by the excellent Yusupov series.

Thanks for reading! Leave a like if you found this helpful.
— Numerot