Chess for Amateurs: How to Improve Your Game - Softcover

The present book is an endeavor to help the aspiring amateur by giving him the sort of games that are played by himself and his circle of intimates. In the games of this book, the reader will find many mistakes of just the kind that are repeatedly committed by himself and players of his caliber. It will help the reader by continually pointing out these mistakes, by explaining their nature, by training him to avoid these errors and to exploit them when made by his opponent. In this way the reader will not only increase his playing strength considerably, but he will be in a position to derive both pleasure and instruction from the beautiful games by the great masters. As further assistance to the student, the games which comprise the bulk of the volume have been supplemented by a number of diagrammed positions from actual play, in the study of which he may obtain additional practice in the evaluation of puzzling situations.

Fred Reinfeld was born on January 27, 1910. Although Fred Reinfeld is now remembered as a writer about chess and other subjects, he was also a strong player. In the 1950 USCF Rating List he was rated number 6 in the United States with a rating of 2593. He defeated Reshevsky twice and Fine once in tournament games and drew World Champion Alekhine in the grandmaster tournament in Pasadena 1932, the strongest tournament ever played in the Western United States. In Pasadena 1932, the strongest grandmaster tournament in the USA in the decade of the 1930s, Fine and Reinfeld both got the same score of 5-6. Fine won their individual game. However, Reinfeld did better against the higher ranked players, including a win over Reshevsky and a draw with World Chess Champion Alexander Alekhine. Final scores were: Alekhine 8.5-2.5, Kashdan 7.5-3.5, Dake, Steiner and Reshevsky 6-5, Borochow 5.5-5.5, Reinfeld, Bernstein, Fine and Factor 5-6, Araiza 3.5-7.5, and Fink 3-8. After that however Reinfeld only played in a few other chess events. He spent the rest of his life writing about the game, not playing it. Reinfeld wrote more than one hundred chess books. In his day, almost all young chess players started off on his books. Nowadays, his books are mostly out of print because they were written in descriptive notation, as this one is. Fred Reinfeld died on May 29, 1964.