Catalogue text:

"How can I improve my game?" is a perennial question facing chess-players.
While there are no easy answers, Alex Yermolinsky is better qualified than most to offer advice. Having found the famed 'Soviet School of Chess' wanting, he trained himself, slowly but surely raising his game to top-class grandmaster standard.
In this book he passes on many of the insights he has gained over the years. He steers the reader away from 'quick-fix' approaches, and focuses on the critical areas of chess understanding and over-the-board decision-making.
This entertainingly-written book breaks new ground in many areas of chess understanding. Topics covered include:

• Trend-Breaking Tools
• The Burden of Small Advantages
• What Exchanges are For
• Classics Revisited
• Computer Chess

A large part of the book discusses a variety of important opening set-ups, including methods for opposing offbeat but dangerous lines, such as the Grand Prix Attack.

Review(s):

This is a magnificent achievement, by far the finest book I've ever seen on the subject of practical play. The best way to describe the impression I got when reading this book is to relate a personal experience. When I try to think of the times when I've learnt the most about chess, my mind always goes back to the rare times during team events that the English team analysed together. Spess (Speelman) would throw pieces around like a wild animal (Incidentally Yermo quotes Shabalov on his criteria for complicating games: that his main concern lies in the variety of ideas present in the positions he can reach in his calculations. If he feels this variety growing, then it's a good sign and he can forge ahead. This sounds to me uncannily like something that Jon Speelman, another chaos-manufacturer once said to me, Jules (Hodgson) would interrupt with comments like 'Weeellll, at the end of the day, when awlllll is said and done...it's just not very clear' but you always waited for one of Mickey's (Adams) laconic comments on the position. You might have a long row of variations and then Mickey would just come out with a comment like 'Hmm, that square looks a bit Czech Benoni [bad] to me...' It revealed something not about a specific line or even a specific position, but more about his way of looking at chess, his attitude under certain circumstances. I felt that I was getting an insight into a way of looking at chess that was so different to my own.
It is this sort of richness that characterises The Road to Chess Improvement. It's written in such a highly personal manner and with such honesty that you really begin to see chess through the eyes of the writer. Throughout the book, there were so many places where I just nodded and said - 'That's right, that's exactly what it is like to play chess. I've made those mistakes myself'. The way he identifies trends in games of chess (one bad move starts a downward trend, and psychological weakness continues it) struck a chord in particular.
The book works excellently on so many levels - as an opening book (the Grünfeld section on the typical Grünfeld pawn structure is particularly good) as a middlegame book (plenty of good advice is given on dynamic pawn sacrifices) and as a self-help guide for wanna-bee strong players. It's a really great book. Buy it!

Matthew Sadler, New in Chess Magazine 1/2000