‘Now that I’m up to 1000, that’s about it,” Howard Stern said of his Internet Chess Club rating. “I just can’t seem to beat those 1100s.”
“But Howard, you’re just giving them free pieces, and they are taking some of them,” replied his teacher, Dan Heisman,
“If you stop giving them free pieces and take all of theirs, you will beat them every game!” It’s basically as easy as that, Heisman argues in “The World’s Most Instructive Amateur Game Book,” an annotated collection of games of average players that is one of several gift-worthy books this holiday season.
An entertaining little tome is “A History of Chess” by Yuri Averbakh. He makes the case that a single person, a ninth-century Persian singer and musician named Ziryab, introduced chess to Western Europe from the Muslim East.
Averbakh, a veteran Russian grandmaster, also says the archetype of the White and Black queens were two real people, represented in an 11th-century set that depicted war between the Normans and Byzantine empire.
Also new and worth a read: “The Queen of Katwe,” Tim Crothers’ riveting account of a teen girl master from Uganda, “Simple Attacking Plans” by Fred Wilson and “Modern Chess Preparation” by Vladimir Tukmakov.