Chessreads is a collection of chess book reviews from a perspective of an improving player. My name is Stjepan, I am a chess player, and a chess content creator. I run the YouTube channel Hanging Pawns. I focus on instructive content and my own progress.
I started playing chess in 2016, and, ever since reading my first chess book, I kept taking notes on everything I’ve read. Chessreads is the result of almost 9 years of playing chess, reading chess books, and creating chess content.
New reviews will be published weekly. The books on Chessreads are divided by category (opening, middlegame, endgame, etc.), and by difficulty (beginner, intermediate, advanced, master). That way you can filter them according to your current strength and according to what you think you have to work on the most. Each book is given two separate scores: readability and usefulness.
The readability score represents how difficult it is to read the book without using a board. A book with 10/10 readability is a bedtime story, a book with 1/10 is a puzzle book full of variations. Readability doesn’t represent the quality of the book. Usefulness is a measure of how useful the book is for chess improvement within the topic it covers. Books with a high usefulness score should help you improve quicker than those with a low score. For example, a book on an opening that focuses on engine lines and covers sidelines without quality annotations will be given a lower score than a book on the same opening that explains the ideas and concepts, as well as the important variations.
Chessreads is accompanied by a YouTube channel where we will be posting reviews in video format, interviewing authors, and recommending reading lists for players of different ratings.
If you have any feedback or suggestions contact us here: [email protected]
