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Recommended Books

For Beginners

In The Chess Tactics Workbook, Al Woolum presents 160 pages of puzzles (6 per page) concentrating on mates in 1, 2, or 3 moves. Lots of great practice for the beginning student with a well-ordered increase in difficulty as the student progresses through the puzzles. Because this book is filled with illustrations but with very little text, it is a great choice for beginners of any age.

An additional resource for early learners is free thanks to our friends at the St. Louis Chess Club and the World Chess Hall of Fame. Dr. Jeanne Cairns Sinquefield has created a wonderful booklet, Learn to Read & Write Chess. It is free to download or you can purchase print copies for just $2.

Grandmaster Murray Chandler is most known for How to Beat Your Dad at Chess (see below) but his earlier book Chess For Children is a great resource for early elementary readers as it features large type and illustrations. The fun stories might need an explanation; beginning 5- and 6-year-olds will need to be told that the alligator is pretending he beat really famous chess players. That said, the instruction is clear and easy to follow and starts with the very basics of how to set up the board, how to move the pieces, and rules before getting into some basic tactics and strategy.

This volume can then be followed up by Chess Puzzles For Kids which works well with older elementary kids as well. Chandler offers 100 different puzzles; the reading level is a little more advanced than Chess for Children.

Teaching the basics is easy with Jeff Coakley’s Winning Chess Strategy for Kids as it covers the rules, basic mates, and elementary tactics. It then leads the student through a whole range of advanced strategies, including piece development, pawn structure, and attacking the castled king. Recommended for students 7 to 13.

For extra practice,  Winning Chess Puzzles For Kids provides exercise sheets with more than 1000 positions, covering mates in one or two moves, and simple tactics such as forks, pins, and discovered checks.

For Advanced Beginners

Todd Bardwick is a National Chess Master who is known to young players across the nation as The Chess Detective. In Chess Endgame Workbook, Todd covers basic principles for king and pawn, minor piece, rook, and queen endings, but moves on to present hundreds of endgame positions from significant master and grandmaster games. Two hundred problems are presented at two skill levels: Basset Hound (novice to intermediate) and Chess Detective (intermediate to advanced).

In Chess Openings, Todd introduces major and minor variations of commonly played opening systems, for beginner to advanced beginners. Easy-to-follow flowcharts show the major openings and variations, separated into three main sections: 1.e4, 1.d4 and Flank Openings.

A chess book for everyone, from eight to eighty, How to Beat Your Dad at Chess explains numerous ways to beat a stronger opponent (be it a friend, clubmate – or Dad!) GM Murray Chandler includes 50 checkmates. – Recommended for older elementary and junior high ages.

How to Beat Your Dad at Chess works well with Chess Puzzles For Kids, covered above, and with Chess Tactics for Kids. This volume features 50 tactics focusing on recognizing the patterns that occur most frequently in real-life play.

For Advanced Beginners/intermediate

Continuing with the Jeff Coakley series, Winning Chess Exercises for Kids clearly explains tactics, strategy, and terminology in simple language graced by lots of illustrations and exercises.

For extra practice Winning Chess Puzzles For Kids Volume 2 provides more exercises at a slightly higher level than Volume 1.

For Teachers and Older “advanced Beginner” Students

Of course, our first recommendation is Great Moves: Learning Chess Through History, by Sunil Weeramantry, Alan Abrams, and Robert McLellan. Written for students with a middle school reading level and above, this text blends chess instruction with history and provides portraits of many of the players and a contextual overview of the world when chess was developing into the game we know today. Chess instruction begins with a review (or an introduction, for new players) of the basics but presented in the context of when these rules and tactics were first published or widely adopted, and advances to analyze games from the leading players of the late 1800s whose play set the standard for today’s grandmasters. (Lexile score: 1050; grades 5 or 6 through Adult.)

A Classic: In Logical Chess: Move by Move, Irving Chernev shows 33 games in detail, explaining the moves of the masters and showing readers where to place the chess pieces for the best results. A perennial best-seller, this book is recommended for older children (and for adults) as well as for teachers.

For Players Rated 1000+

In this long-awaited extension of the classic Best Lessons of a Chess Coach, the reader is invited to take a seat in the classroom of a renowned chess teacher, and learn how to answer such questions while experiencing the beauty, logic, and artistry of great chess games. When Sunil Weeramantry lectures on the games of top grandmasters, one can imagine making decisions alongside them. When he lectures on his own games, one can also experience the personal excitement, disappointment, and satisfaction of a well-contested game of chess. The cumulative effect of studying these lessons is to give the aspiring player a wide range of tools with which to win. Recommended for players with a middle school reading level and above, and a playing strength of USCF 1000+.