Chess book reviews from a perspective of an improving player. 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.
Rating:
- 1800
- -
- 2200
- Beating the Hedgehog System
- Laszlo Hazai, Hanna Ivan-Gal
Rating:
- 1600
- -
- 2200
- Lessons with a Grandmaster 2, Improve Your Tactical Vision and Dynamic Play with Boris Gulko
- Boris Gulko, Joel Sneed
Rating:
- 1000
- -
- 1800
- Practical Chess Exercises: 600 Lessons from Tactics to Strategy
- Ray Cheng
Rating:
- 1600
- -
- 2200
- Chess Imbalances: A Grandmaster Guide
- Mauricio Flores Rios
Rating:
- 2000
- -
- 2200+
- Dvoretsky’s Endgame Manual 6th Edition
- Mark Dvoretsky, Karsten Müller, Alex Fishbein
Rating:
- 2000
- -
- 2200+
- Secrets of Queen Endgames
- Ferenc Berkes, Tibor Karolyi
Rating:
- 1400
- -
- 2200+
- GM Preparation: Thinking Inside the Box
- Jacob Aagaard
Rating:
- 1400
- -
- 2200
- Lessons with a Grandmaster, Enhance Your Chess Strategy And Psychology With Boris Gulko
- Boris Gulko, Joel Sneed
Rating:
- 1400
- -
- 2200
- The Exchange Sacrifice according to Tigran Petrosian
- Vassilios Kotronias
Rating:
- 1800
- -
- 2200
- The How to Study Chess on Your Own Workbook – Volume 1
- Davorin Kuljasevic
Rating:
- 1400
- -
- 1800
- The How to Study Chess on Your Own Workbook – Volume 2
- Davorin Kuljasevic
Rating:
- -
- 2200+
- The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance
- Josh Waitzkin
Rating:
- -
- 2200+
- Endgame: Bobby Fischer’s Remarkable Rise and Fall
- Frank Brady
Rating:
- -800
- -
- 1000
- Chess for Kids: My First Chess Book to Learn How to Play and Win
- Samuel Mate
Rating:
- -800
- -
- 1000
- Chess for Children: How to Play the World’s Most Popular Board Game
- Murray Chandler, Helen Milligan
Rating:
- 1200
- -
- 2200
- Unveiling the Victory, How Spassky Won The Third World Junior Chess Championship Antwerp 1955
- Henri Serruys
Rating:
- -
- 2200+
- Critical Theory: A Chess Biography of Isaak Lipnitsky
- Mykola Fuzik, Alexei Radchenko
