I'm an experienced poker player however I'm an absolute chess novice. Aside from the obvious "just practice" advice, what are the best resources to fall back on in terms of books, videos etc if I wanted to learn the game in significant depth?
I know this is cliche, but I think the single most effective way to improve is to play a lot, then review your games with a player that is stronger than you and have them point out better moves you could have made, explain your thought process, etc. If you don't have a stronger player available to look at your games (I can look at a few :) ), then just replay them yourself, look for moves where the game turned towards one player and things you could have done better. Or, plug them into a computer program and see what moves the computer suggests, and then ask yourself why the computer is suggesting them.
For books, I started out by reading a few books by Yasser Seirawan. Two titles I particularly found helpful are "Winning Chess Strategies" and "Winning Chess Tactics". Seirawan is a good writer and both titles do a really good job explaining their concepts to players new to the game. Jeremy Silman wrote a book called "The Amateur's Mind" which I thought was pretty good, that compares thought processes between amateurs, intermediate, and expert level players across similar positions.
One other idea is to simply get a book that is a collection of annotated master/grandmaster games, set up a board, make some coffee, and replay through them. Review the authors notes. Replay them again. Get a sense for the openings being used and the different strategies. Two good collections are "The Mammoth Book of Greatest Chess Games" by Burgess and "The Most Instructive Chess Games Played" (can't remember author).
Chess.com is a great free place to play. They have free tournaments and games online, you can get a rating, track your progress, etc. If you do a paid membership, you get access to videos, tutorials etc. I just use the free membership, so I can't comment as to how good these videos are, but at least to me they look solid.
Good luck. Happy to help more offline (maybe trade for poker tips :) )
I agree with reading Jeremy Silman. My first chess book was http://www.amazon.com/Complete-Chess-Player-Fred-Reinfeld/dp.... I started beating my dad after reading it! It covers some basic positional ideas (control of the center, pawn structure) and basic tactical ideas (pins, discovered check). With those two things, you can go a long ways.
Once you get a good handle on that, analyzing your own games and reviewing GM games starts to become helpful.
Don't worry about reading lots of chess books and learning all the theory or openings (other than the basics, that is). The main things you should do are:
1] Develop a good thought process and general approach to the game. NM Dan Heisman has an excellent series of articles ('The Thinking Cap', 'Novice Nook' and others). Find his stuff and study it well.
2] Tactics, tactics, tactics! chesstempo.com is my favourite place for tactics problems. Make an account there and play regularly; you'll see a huge and rapid improvement in your game. There are many great books that cover this ground as well.
3] Play regularly at reasonably slow time controls (necessary to utilize and internalize the proper thought process), mainly against players who are slightly better than you are. FICS or ICC are great places to play online (humans, unlike chess engines, will not allow you to take back your mistakes, which tends to focus the mind!).
4] Analyze your games. Ideally you'll have a stronger human to help you with this, otherwise get a strong chess engine. Identify your major tactical blunders and remember the patterns so you can avoid making the same mistakes in future.
5] Go through annotated games of the strongest grandmasters. There are lots of collections available. Good ones for starters are Morphy, Marshall, Spielmann, Alekhine, Tal and Kasparov (highly tactical players).
6] You can also find GM games where one player resigned. Take the winning side and finish the game against a chess engine on its highest strength. See if you can convert the win.
7] Now you can read a bit more about strategy, openings, etc. Try to play openings that lead to open, tactical positions (forget about whatever the latest fashions amongst grandmasters are). Excellent choices are the various gambits, and ancient openings like the Spanish, Italian, etc.
The number one thing you should work on as a chess novice (and a chess intermediate!) is tactics. chesstempo.com is the best place on the web to practice tactics: it serves you tactics problems from a database of over 100,000 problems harvested from actual games, and keeps track of both your ability and the difficulty of the problems so that it can give you problems appropriate to your level.
There are other tactics servers on the web (chess.com, chess.emrald.net), but Chess Tempo is easily the best.
seconded. No single book made a greater difference in my playing level. Reading this at a relatively young age made me a far better positional player than everyone else around me.
My System was my second chess book. I bought it in an underground book market in a forest for 10 roubles when I was a 9 year old.
It is a great book and without it I would have struggled to reach FM, but it is a little bit too advanced for a first book. I'd say it is a good 4th or 5th book.
I'd say something like Lasker's manual of chess would be better suited as a first book. Perhaps one of the other starter's volumes from Seirawan, et al would fit the bill.
If you're a novice, here's some good advice: play lots of games, but when you study, study tactics. Get some basics down on the endgame, some strategy concepts, but just the very basics, and then just study tactics. And by that I mean do tactical exercises. Most of your games, as in 98% of them, will be lost/won due to tactical errors and blunders (a blunder is just a really, really bad tactical error). If you keep to tactics you'll get pretty good over time. When you reach, say 1800, you can start getting to grips with some deeper strategical ideas, study more openings, etc.
Oh, and since you asked about books, here are two books that came to mind and are pretty good (and you can go through them in this order):
Winning Chess Tactics by Seirawan
Winning Chess Tactics for Juniors by Lou Hays
Oh, and don't mind the 'Winning' in both titles. You'll lose plenty of games right now :-)
