My System: 21st Century Edition (Taschenbuch)

MY SYSTEM -- Your key to understanding chess
Chess is first a game of UNDERSTANDING. Have you ever wondered why strong players overwhelm you at chess? The tactics always belong to them. You never have any counterplay. From start to finish your position gets worse and worse and you don't know why. Sound POSITIONAL PLAY is what these players are using to beat you. How did they learn it? Well .... experience counts for some of this understanding, but we all know people who have played chess for decades and not become very good. Virtually every chess master in the world has studied "My System" by Aron Nimzowitsch. Here's a quote from world-class Grandmaster Yasser Seirawan in his introduction to "My System - 21st Century Edition." --- "MY SYSTEM is a book that provokes you to think differently about chess. It challenges you to consider a different approach and urges you to prove or refute Nimzowitsch's ideas. It is also a book that you can read and reread, each time coming away with different lessons and insights, leading to a deeper understanding of the game." Grandmaster Seirawan goes on to discuss the benefits of his repeated readings of "My System", first as a teenager, and later during difficult periods in his chess career. The first nine chapters of "My System" make up PART ONE - THE ELEMENTS. Nimzowitsch said, "A thorough knowledge of the elements takes us more than halfway to mastership." What are these elements? Chapter 1. The center and development. Chapter 2. Open files. Chapter 3. The seventh and eighth ranks. Chapter 4. The passed pawn. Chapter 5. Exchanging. Chapter 6. Elements of endgame strategy. Chapter 7. The pin. Chapter 8. Discovered check. Chapter 9. The pawn chain. These nine chapters take only 100 pages of the book and can be learned and understood by any aspiring chess player. Once you have absorbed what is in these chapters, you can move on to the more sohpisticated PART TWO - POSITIONAL PLAY. Chapter 10. Positional play and the center. Chapter 11. the doubled pawn and restraint. Chapter 12. The isolated d-pawn and its descendants. Chapter 14. The two Bishops. Chapter 14. Overprotection. Chapter 15. Maneuvering against weaknesses. The final section of "My System - 21st Century Edition" consists of fifty well-annotated and instructive chess games. These games are integrated with the previous sections and used as study examples for these earlier chapters. Nimzowitsch's chess writing is entertaining and witty, adding to the pleasure of studying this great book. "My System" is a fun, challenging, thorough and fullfilling learning experience. As Grandmaster Seirawan says, it requires you to think differently about chess and will greatly increase your UNDERSTANDING. Virtually every Grandmaster, International Master, master, and even expert has read "My System." "My System - 21st Century Edition" is in algebraic notation and contains 419 diagrams, nearly double the number in the older edition. As editor, I did everything possible to make it as easy as possible to study. The book is edited for the modern reader, but leaves out nothing from the old descriptive edition. Tens of thousands of players worldwide have purchased this new edition. Join this crowd of winning chess players and start UNDERSTANDING chess with "My System - 21st Century Edition". --Lou Hays, Editor / Publisher.