Chess Books at Borders

Posted by GilaChess
July 8, 2006

Tonight I stopped by at KL’s Berjaya Mall’s Borders bookstore to check out their chess books collection.


Frankly I was a little disappointed as being one of the biggest bookstore in Malaysia they had only 2 racks of chess books (see pix above)

Anyway I sat down to read a book on choosing an opening by Gambit publications. Pretty interesting read. I believe the author name was.

I read with interest the part he mentions that you can use Fritz as a training partner if a human player cannot be found. Like many chess players I have given up playing against the Fritz monster - using it only for analysis. Bear in mind this is only for opening preparations. So I guess it is practical. He recommends that you take both sides of a particular opening variation being studied. The effectiveness of it was substantianted with the author giving a nice example of Yusupov vs Ivanchuk match where Ivanchuk - the opening expert was surprisingly beaten.

I have to admit I did underestimate the quality of the book seeing that the author is only an FM. Overall a good book reasonably priced at RM 79 (USD 22).

I was also tempted to buy Jeremy Silman’s Assess Your Chess Workbook but had to forego that on account of my empty wallet :)

I have to say that reading a chess book at Borders bookstore was a pleasant surprise. Before I knew it an hour had already passed by and I had to go home as it was 10pm already.

Using Fritz as a sparring partner is definitely a point I’m seriously considering now as it’s not as absurd as it sounded before I read this book.

Taylor College Tourney 2

Time to start training for the next tournament which is the Taylor College Ultimate Challenge at the end of this month.

I want to enter this so as to make sure the results are collected personally from the organiser so as it can be displayed here and on GilaChess as well as Stonemaster.biz. The funny thins is that I don’t even know the previous Taylor Open result which was held only 2 months ago. That certainly doesn’t bode well with my nickname “GilaChess” :)

Royal Selangor Juniors

Will be going to see tomorrow’s Junior tourney in Monash Uni (formerly Sunway College). Is the response as poor as reported during the pre-registration.

Going there also to test out if I can post ‘live’ using Sunway College WiFi facilities (have never done that before)

Popularity: 8% [?]

Chess, Chess Books

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Comments

It’s that expensive for a chess book over there? I can find a lot of chess books for less than 15 dollars here. Some books in the half price book store are being selled for only 7 dollars per book.

Do you think it’s too expensive too? Or is it just me?

Comment by zabbura2002 on July 9, 2006 @ 9:53 am

Most of the books are at that price. There are just a handful at Usd 15. And no, its not just you. I too, feel they are a bit too expensive

Comment by GilaChess on July 9, 2006 @ 2:50 pm

depends on what kind of chess books…but most of the new ones are around this price, not cheap. And in sg too, there’s only borders and kino in orchard that have a somewhat decent stock of chess books. (2-4 racks per store) Anything else, I got mostly through amazon (price was okay considering that I usually buy in bulk and lower listed prices on older books offset the shipping cost a bit), and for some really old books I tried londonchess. And 1 or 2 books from boardlink organizers

Hah, you prolly got to get hold of “how to reassess your chess” if you like Silman’s books. It’s a must for collectors although it doesn’t look as “good” as the later books

Comment by ark on July 11, 2006 @ 2:16 pm
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