Harish Srinivasan - Chess

There is a chess club that meets round the week at different venues. There are plenty of rated tournaments happening as well as casual unrated over the board games every week. More information with daily updates are at this blogspot link

The world chess championship is a very complex cycle, especially for the next two years. All the details are given in this Chart

A good mixture of chess theory books and tactics books are hard to collect. Below are the ones I possess and found it really usefull when I used it along with my chess lessons with GM Kiriakov.

Mark Dvortesky's books Mark Dvortesky is claimed as one of the best authors. You may look at his more detailed profile at Wikipedia

• Endgame manual 2nd Edition One of the best books that I posess. If you are rated around 1900 or above, and you are serious about improving your endgame, there cannot be a better book.
• Strategic Play: School of Chess Excellence 3I have just started to read this book, but already I am finding this book a lot different and usefull in the way the author explains concepts.
• Tactical Play: School of Chess Excellence 2 Again this book is primarily for the very serious player in the range of 1900 and above. The excercises are difficult and challenging, but it provides a very systematic ideas and a lot of encouragement for solving tactical positions. This is the top book recommended by GM Vishy Anand(in one of his interviews) for improving tactics. What else do you need!!

• The ideas behind chess Openings by Reuben Fine (level Beginner - Intermediate. This is good for general theory on chess openings but some opening variations may be outdated but the ideas are solid)
• The Middle games in Chess by Reuben Fine (Level Intermediate - Advanced. This book has many typos, but very nice tactical book full of patterns to learn. )
• Basic Chess Endings by Reuben Fine (Level Intermediate - Advanced. This is THE bible for chess endings. EXHAUSTIVE. However, this is not a manual as the Dvortesky's mentioned above. You can imagine this as an encylopedia of chess endgame positions. This complements the other book well.)

These books are for improving thinking planning and positional strategies are below. I do not rate them the best, but that may be because I personally do not feel I have benefited significantly from them. Nevetheless, they may be usefull at a later stage.

• The Amateur Mind By Jeremy Silman
• How to Reasses your Chess by Jeremy Silman
• The Reasses your chess workbook by Jeremy silman

I found the books mentioned below EXCELLENT for comprehensive (but tractable) study of openings. This is best if you want make your own opening repertoire. I mention only those that I possess below. There are others in the same series as well. There is plenty of theory as well as real games with full analysis.

• Starting Out: Ruy Lopez By John Shaw
• Starting Out: Sicilian By John Emms
• Starting Out: Queens Gambit By John Shaw
• Starting Out: French By Bryan Jacobs
• Starting Out: Caro-Kann By Joe Gallagher
• The ..a6 slav:Tricky and dynamic lines of 4 ..a6 Glenn Flear I personally have the ..a6 slav as my repertoire against the queens pawn and hence this book is very good and extensive.

Everyone says chess is 98% tactics. But there are just numerous tactics/puzzle books available. Personally I like books that DONT have puzzles like "Mate in 3", "Mate in 4" etc. I like puzzles with just says "Find the winning move".

• Find the winning move: Garry Lane (this is an excellent book for people in 1800-2100 rating)
• Chess tactics for champions: Susan Polgar (good but may be suited to 1200-1800 players)

• Garry Kasparov's My great predecessors - Volume 1 Book recommended to me by GM Petr Kiriakov. Certianly a great read for chess fans with detailed analysis of classic games.
• My system by Aron Nimzovich. A classic book to be read over and over again. I guess most chess experts will agree that this is an excellent must buy book.
• Garry Kasparov on Modern Chess: Revolution in the 70's Part I. I purchased this very recently (5/14/2007) and got some very interesting ideas on a few selected openings such as the Sveshnikov, Najdorf and the Chelbanko(...a6 slav). One of the fine aspects about this book is it explains as to the reason for the origin/popularity of a particular opening variation.
• San Luis 2005: Alik Gershon and Igor Nor. This book is very new and I purchased it immediately(August 2007). I had followed the San Luis 2005 world championship tournament very closely and this book has complete analysis of all the games and a wonderful piece of work to relive the tournament's memories. Yet to read this fully.

• I found the Chess Openings
  Chess software that teaches and tests you on the openings, middlegames, endgames and tactics extremely useful.
  It helps to save the positions that are described in chess books. Saving the positions helps when I want to revisit openings or some tactical playing techniques. I have converted all of my above mentioned books, into e-books with the comments as mentioned in the book. And these e-books can be opened and analyzed from this Chess Opening software known as Bookup.

• Nalimov tablebases: You can download these end game tablebases from the ftp site Download Nalimov Tablebases. Select the 3-4-5 folder (quite extensive in itself). Such a tablebase can be used by Chess engines such as Crafty or others to quickly solve end game positions. This tablebase can also be along with the Chess Openings software mentioned above. Note: It takes about 4 hrs to download the whole folder.

http://www.chessclub.com/ Play chess on internet and plenty more.

http://www.chessbase.com  (For update on current tournaments and commentaries on the tours of Grandmasters)

World chess federation

US Chess Federation. Plenty of information on over the board tournaments, membership information to US Chess Federation(including getting an international uscf rating).

Chess lectures (video). Payed site that contain plenty of chess lectures by International Masters and one new lecture every weekday. An extremely usefull way to learn.

Chess Circle Forums The place for Chess !