Move First, Think Later: Sense and Nonsense in Improving Your Chess, 3rd Edition

I’m rated 2000+ and thoroughly enjoyed this book. I agree with the author that patterns and knowledge gleaned from studying quality games makes a huge difference, and a good memory is essential. Many of my best games have resulted from using such knowledge and I doubt at my level I would have found the key moves without the great array of patterns I’ve learned over the years. I also liked the format of problems preceding the chapters. I am doubtful that the book is going to be useful for weaker players. I would suggest that if you’re below 1800 you should be very committed to get the most out of it. It won’t be an easy book. There’s no one way to learn chess and that’s the central message. If anyone tells you that they have the magic bullet, they don’t. That’s his final message.

I like the general point of this book - which is that a great deal of strategic theory is "trailing theory" -- meaning, more of an explanation after the fact than a set of inflexible rules.As a beginner, I tended to try to latch onto "hard and fast rules" everywhere I could (e.g. never move the knight to the edge). As everyone knows, all chess "rules" come with the caveat "under most circumstances", or "usually."What Hendriks goes out to prove, pretty well, is that MOST of the theories that we hear, and the extensive books on broad strategic philosophies are usually backed by specific examples and can be countered by other games. For example, it would seem to be the case that when the opponent's Queen is on a square directly next to your King, you must move the King. Good rule! Except for the times that you take the Queen. Get it?Now, apply that same flexibility to larger theories that he challenges in his book, like "when attacked on the flank, counter-attack in the center" (he really nukes that one!).Ultimately, this is a good book about MOVING FIRST (make your tactical analysis, your pragmatic move choice) and THINKING LATER (use a theory to bolster why you did it, rather than trying to use a theory to generate your move).I gave this 3 stars for two reasons: the first is because he gives up to 10 puzzles at the beginning of each chapter. While I love a good puzzle, I tend to sit down with a chess book (or any book) for about 15-30 minutes ... and when I hit these puzzles (which are integral to the following chapter's ideas), I am required to do them, remember them, and then be prepared to see what he's referencing in the following chapter, which may take days to read in 30 minute chunks.That, combined with the fact that SOME of his examples are intentionally difficult (even for Masters, they're all about "most people don't see that", etc.) -- it becomes draining to hit that wall of puzzles at the end of a chapter. So each chapter ends with "yay -- that was a cool outline, arg, more puzzles ... thud"The second reason I gave this 3 stars is because -- well -- after awhile, he's telling you the same thing over and over ... use tactical and practical thinking to make your move.

I consider IM Hendriks a bit of a provacateur in terms of the thesis he lays out, but this book is 1) well written and entertaining 2) highly original 3) great chess puzzles and love his format of alternating puzzle and prose chapters and tieing the two together. I get that not everyone loves this book, but would encourage anyone on the fence to check it out and form her own opinion. You might love it ( as I did.)

It's not very often that an entire book is summarized by the title, but this is such a book. The outrageous title is the author's way of making a point that is actually quite old or namely if you expose your brain to good moves in a given position, your brain will assimilate this into it's inner processing and help you choose the best move.The book is filled with psychology, philosophy, and quite frankly opinion. The basic idea really is that many of the conventional approaches to chess improvement simply are contrived and hard to implement into a clear and coherent method for OTB play. I can't argue with him on that having read many (hundreds) of chess books. The author argues that making a plan is close to non-sensical because very few people can see how a game might morph too far in advance. He also is highly critical of "advice" given by authors who are trying to shape the thinking of their book-reading students. Jeremy Silman is heavy target of Hendriks because of his "advice-like" style of chess instruction. But to be fair, the author rejects almost all chess advice given in books and instead himself just advises "pick a good move".He spends most of the book trying to justify this approach and it relies heavily on his work on the theory of mind. I tend to think he's on to something here and it really is based on force feeding the brain with well-annotated games. The idea being that if you see a good example of an idea that is tactically possible, you'll consider it yourself and hopefully calculate correctly if it works in your position. So, this is good for young developing brains, but not so great for aging chess brains (probably over 25), and if true, means that you can't expect to really advance much as an aging chess player (again, anyone over 25). My guess is that statistically this is somewhat true. And the only hope that you might have if you're over 25 is if your brain has already had to do a similarly kind of processing for some other activity (and can get those synaps firing despite your age).So, why just 4 stars?The book simply does not really address enough elements of chess to be complete. For example, you certainly can't do the "move first, think later" mechanism playing correspondence chess. I can tell you right now that you'll lose. In other words, the iterative process doesn't fit well within this outlook. In fact, this highlights a problem even with his initial thesis and mantra. For example, many chess players will be drawn to an idea or move and then iterate based on the problems associated with evaluating that move. This is the basis of the book Imagination in Chess and really more accurately represents how a chess player works through candidate moves. This really isn't developed during the book which subsequently leaves some fairly large holes. In addition, his criticism of authors like Silman, Soltis, Watson (coincidence that they're all Americans?) is really unfair, even if there is more than a strand of truth to some of the criticism. Silman is trying to connect with players who are trying to learn chess without spending hundreds of hours on the internet teaching their brains the right patterns etc.. I personally think that Silman's treatment of imbalance in positions is amongst the best in chess material. The author correctly states that it's too much to think consciously about features of a position, but at some point, you need some instruction that gives you the over-arching idea. Often game collections, written by strong IMs and GMs, don't think (and subsequently express) the positional features that their brain knew and then communicate to the learning student. An excellent book is Chess Blueprints because it not only provides the examples to program your chess brain, but provides the meta-idea that hopefully you can apply in your games.So, as a wrap-up, this is a book that should be read by any aspiring chess student, and if you put the work in, you'll improve your chess by doing the things that the author sugggests (studying well-annotated games, studying middle game positions to find a good move, using a computer to analyze your games to provide the corrective feedback for your brain. The author does have a dry sense of humor, but I don't believe that Steve Giddins laughed all the way through the book. The book is very readable without a chess board and this is what I consider a "quick" chess read (less than a week or two). But if you don't like psychology, philosophy, or think that Stephen Pinker is a destabilizing force in academic thought (he is the one that advised Larry Summors, then president of Harvard, that girls were not predisposed to be good at science), you might want to take a pass on this book. But I will say that this book supports the data that has young kids playing thousands of hours on the internet and working their way up to strong players very quickly. Of course this is a bit depressing for the rest of us who are past 25 and can only expect "modest to little" improvement if Hendrik's theory is correct.

A very interesting and entertaining book.

Looking for a way to improve my middle to end game (I'm an entry level club player), but also keeping in mind that most of my study time is on my daily commute, I went looking for a useful book that did not require a chess board next to me.And useful it turns out to be, though not the in the way I imagined. I always played chess under the impression that experts have some sort of deeper thinking ability - whereas I can perhaps imagine 2 or 3 moves ahead before things become fuzzy, the expert can, so I believed, take this number much higher.Hendriks argues that this ability of the expert has less to do with hidden cognitive powers, and more to do with recognizing a situation for what it is based on past experience. Relying on the research done by psychologists, he shows that grand masters do not really have significant mental abilities that lesser player lacks - what they have is, in short, memory and experience.So here is the bad news: there is no short cut to improving your chess. The key to improvement is to build up your experience - by playing, doing exercises and applying pattern recognition. When looking at a chess problem, the grand master can quickly recognise the transpositions that will lead to pattern that he is familiar with, using a standard set of tools at his disposal.The book is dedicated to building up this tool set for the reader. How to open a line, how to chase away an offending piece, how to use the threat of a discovered attack to force your opponent to make weak moves - these should not be new or surprising for any player, but they all require a good workout before they become effective.In addition, Hendriks is not shy to voice his opinion on the "snake oil salesmen" of chess tuition - the authors that try to convince us that we need some special structured thought process, that good moves flow somehow out of positional characteristics - in fact, he argues it is the other way around: we only recognize positional strengths and weaknesses based on the available good moves.The exercises in the book are hard (for me at least), and to make it worse, no hints are given as to their goal. Hendriks argues (correctly, in my view), that the position is the problem in itself - giving a hint allows the reader to focus on only a sub-set of the problem, which is not what chess playing is all about. The good news is that none of them require a chess board, and even during the discussion of the solution, Hendriks provides enough intermediate diagrams so that the progression is easily followed in your head.

I don't own a great number of adult chess books, although I was buying them up - especially "classics" such as Nimzowitsch's My System - at an alarming rate, until I bought this. The problem was I needed a strategy for reading chess books - there are so many to choose from - and then you have to work out how you are going to read them - how important is solving the puzzles, how to remember the general ideas of each book, etc. Well, this book highlighted some misconceptions I had about reading chess books, and instead got me to focus on chess. When I do get the chance to read a chess book now (including this one, which itself requires quite a high standard of skill to get through), then I'm concentrating on chess, and not trying to find magical formulae to help me win.

I own a lot of chess books. Many of them sit on my shelves either partially read or untouched. Occasionally I get on my own case about this, telling myself if only I'd read these books instead of watching TV/having fun I'd be a much better player. One of those times I decided to read this book. The chess exercises were well chosen and taught me a few new patterns I hadn't come across before. However, the most enjoyable part of the book for me was the thought provoking prose.Having been stuck at the same level for a long time I occasionally enjoy a bit of philosophising about how I could improve. Is there a secret tip for improvement that will magically add 100 points to my rating? Sometimes I play at a higher level for 10 or so games, wonder if I've made a breakthrough, only for the next 10 to be a complete disaster. Is it confidence? Maybe if I added a little check list of things to think about on each move I'd stop blundering my pieces? Maybe a different opening choice is all that's required? It's all complete tripe according to Hendriks! The difference in results can be explained by statistics and the only way to improve is to solve lots of problems and assimilate the associated patterns. I find his arguments here convincing and I've changed the way I study chess accordingly to focus more on solving problems.Some of the other arguments in the book aren't so convincing to me, although they certainly made me stop and think. An example being his distrust/dislike of instructional books that's propose a structured thought process. His argument is that strong players simply start looking at specific moves immediately and slowly weighing up the position before doing this is a waste of time. Personally I read such a book when I was younger and credit it for assisting my improvement. I no longer consciously perform any type of check list of the type that book proposed, but it was definitely helpful then and has likely been integrated somewhat into my subconscious. Just because this type of thinking isn't useful for experienced players doesn't mean it can't help inexperienced players who look at many positions in desperation, not knowing what they're aiming for.Overall I thought the book was fantastic. It was funny, had good chess puzzles and changed the way I think about the game in a number of ways. For someone who's been playing chess competitively for 20 years that doesn't happen every day.

Another boring chess book with oodles of notation.

Whether my Chess will improve as a result of reading this book I do not know; but as a fascinating mix of Chess, Philosophy and Psychology this was a wonderful read. The central theme, that actions are made according to immediate circumstances only to be rationalised later as part of a bigger picture stands good, I believe, beyond the discipline of Chess training. The 'narrative fallacy' is alive and well in many walks of life.