Chess For Zebras – Book Review

I had liked Jonathan Rowson writing for quite awhile now so I was curious to see what ideas he has to share in his book Chess For Zebras. One interesting idea that drew my attention was that many chess amateurs pursue a lifetime goal of expanding their chess knowledge.  Our hope is that this would eventually directly improve our practical strength. In particular I had written a blog post on this exact subject.

Rowson arrives at a similar conclusion to what I implied in my post - chess knowledge and chess skills are two very different things. So rather than trying to memorize as many openings and positional ideas as possible it is much better to spend the same time practicing those ideas. A software application that provides the student with training positions will do more for their positional skill than an abstract collection of ideas that will be simply presented to them as pure facts.