8 Underrated Chess Books Every Player Should Read

8 books almost no one talks about. Chess books that are underrated and yet so incredibly useful every ambitious player should read them. I have tried to include books on the opening, middlegame, and the endgame, as well as books of varying difficulty. They will all be useful for even the strongest masters, though, that is another criteria I’d used. These 8 chess books would benefit anyone’s play, regardless of rating, current skill level, or anything else.

Read the full article on most underrated chess books on Chessreads

1. Chess Structures: A Grandmaster Guide, Mauricio Flores Rios
   Winning or losing most often comes down to understanding what should be done in a position. That always depends on the pawn structure. The pawn structure determines strategy, creates tactical opportunities, and is essential in creating long-term plans. Mauricio Flores Rios has created the ultimate guide to 28 most common pawn structures in chess.

2. Lessons on Uncompromising Play, David Navara
   Lessons on Uncompromising Play is a book meant for strong players who are willing to do hard work to progress further. It’s not a book on tactics, strategy, or the endgame, it’s a book on how to play good, uncompromising chess and how to win games. It addresses the key questions of chess: how to win, how to seize the initiative, how to convert when you’re better, how to defend when worse, how to attack, how to handle dynamics, and how to win on demand or in equal positions.

3. Supreme Chess Understanding, Wojciech Moranda
   Supreme Chess Understanding explains the difference between static and dynamic advantages, highlighting the importance of being able to do so while playing, and how knowing where your advantage (or disadvantage) lies enables you to evaluate, plan, and play precisely, according to what the position requires. Moranda goes over each problem in great depth, ensuring proper understanding of all the features of the position one had to appreciate in order to solve it. For everyone who’s already covered the basics of calculation, strategy, and positional play, this book will be a great tool for improving understanding of different types of complex positions.

4. Conceptual Rook Endgames Workbook, Jacob Aagaard
   Conceptual Rook Endgames Workbook is meant to teach you how to recognize and navigate recurring patterns in themes essential for understanding and playing rook endgames well. It does a very good job of introducing, explaining, and, most importantly, forcing you to become skilled at playing rook endgames. It consists of 208 problems of varying difficulty. The difficulty increases with each chapter.

5. How to Study Chess on Your Own, Davorin Kuljasevic
   How to Study Chess on Your Own is a practical guide on perfecting your chess study. Its purpose is to, as Davorin puts it: “Encourage readers to study with proper structure, and help readers become independent in their study.”

6. The Art of the Endgame, Jan Timman
   The Art of the Endgame is rarely mentioned on best chess books lists, and yet it’s the best collection of endgame studies ever assembled in my opinion. Annotations by Jan Timman are exceptional as well. Solving endgame studies helps your endgame understanding and improves your calculation and visualization, but their main purpose and benefit is broadening your imagination and creativity. Being able to think unorthodoxly, in a creative manner uncommon in real play over the board, helps when dealing with complex positions and helps find resources an untrained eye wouldn’t be able to spot. The Art of the Endgame is considered by many to be the best collection of endgame studies ever written. It will surely enhance your creativity, improve your calculation, and earn you rating points!

7. The Hidden Laws of Chess, Nick Maatman
   The Hidden Laws of Chess is a book that teaches how to know what to look at and what to look for in a chess position. It goes way beyond simple concepts, and delves deep into complex problems such as evaluating a space advantage, how to make a difference when positions are symmetrical, how to find value in doubled pawns, and much more.

8. Squeezing the Gambits: The Benko, Budapest, Albin and Blumenfeld, Kiril Georgiev
   I don’t think I was ever blown away by an opening book before. Georgiev wrote an almost perfect guide on how to deal with four very annoying openings most 1.d4 players dread facing: the Benko, the Budapest, the Albin, and the Blumenfeld. Instead of going over tens of lines that are unlikely to ever happen over the board, giving engine sidelines and weird ideas hard for humans to understand, Georgiev gives applicable strategic tools you can use even if your opponent deviates from book moves.
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