Best Chess Books for Absolute Beginners: A UK Buyer's Guide

Learning chess from a book sounds like hard work. It isn't, as long as the book is pitched at the level you are actually at. Most beginners make the same mistake: they buy a heavyweight volume on openings, get lost somewhere around page thirty, and quietly decide that chess books are for other people. The right first book does the opposite — it hands you a handful of ideas and then gives you positions to solve until those ideas stick. What follows is a guide to the beginner titles that genuinely work, what each one is good at, and the order in which to read them.

What separates a useful beginner book from a shelf-warmer

Three things matter. First, the book should make you do something: answer a question, cover the page, find the mate. Reading chess passively feels productive and teaches very little. Second, it should be narrow. A book that tries to cover openings, middlegame strategy and endings in one go will skate over all three. Third, it should be written in plain language and use algebraic notation, which beginners pick up in about twenty minutes.

Watch out for anything labelled "complete" or "encyclopaedia". Those books are reference works. They are fine to own and terrible to learn from.

Start here: primers that teach the rules and the basics

Learn Chess by John Nunn is one of the best first books available to UK readers. It moves briskly from how the pieces move through notation, basic tactics and simple checkmates, then finishes with short games you can follow move by move. Nunn writes without condescension and never wastes a page.

The Right Way to Play Chess by David Pritchard is the older, gentler option. It covers the rules thoroughly, including the ones club players still argue about, and says useful things about etiquette and playing in your first tournament. If you are joining a club rather than playing online, this one earns its place.

Chess for Dummies by James Eade is best treated as a reference rather than a course. Dip into the chapter you need, then put it back. Reading it cover to cover is a slog, and there are better ways to spend your first month.

Books that teach by walking you through whole games

Once you can follow notation, annotated games become the richest material available. Logical Chess: Move by Move by Irving Chernev explains every single move of thirty-three games, which is exactly what a beginner needs. Do check which printing you are buying: some editions use descriptive notation, which looks like a code and will confuse you for no good reason. Modern algebraic printings are the ones to look for.

Play Winning Chess by Yasser Seirawan takes a different route, building everything around four principles — force, time, space and pawn structure. It is friendly, well organised and gives you vocabulary for talking about positions, which helps enormously when you review your own games.

A chess book you work through once is worth ten you merely read.

Tactics books: the quickest route to better results

If you only buy one book after your primer, make it a tactics book. Most games below club level are decided by a piece left hanging or a missed mate in two, not by deep strategy.

• Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess — built around questions printed on the page with answers overleaf. It drills simple mates and back-rank patterns until you spot them instantly.
• How to Beat Your Dad at Chess by Murray Chandler — fifty mating patterns, clearly diagrammed. Written with juniors in mind, but adults get just as much from it.
• Any large puzzle collection — a book of several hundred mate-in-one and mate-in-two positions will do more for your results than any strategy title at this stage.

Aim for ten to fifteen minutes a day. Accuracy matters far more than speed, and guessing your way through puzzles builds bad habits.

Openings and endings: what to read, and what to ignore

Beginners are sold opening books far too early. Learn a few principles and you will be fine for a year. Discovering Chess Openings by John Emms is the exception worth owning, because it explains why moves are played rather than listing variations to memorise.

At the other end, Simple Checkmates by A. J. Gillam covers the mates you must know: king and queen, king and rook, and the basic pawn endings where one side promotes first. Endgame knowledge is dull to study and remarkably profitable in practice — games that look drawn are frequently not.

If you want one general reference to sit alongside these, The Mammoth Book of Chess by Graham Burgess is good value and easy to find in the UK. Treat it as a book to consult, not to finish.

A simple reading plan for your first six months

1. Choose one primer and work through it properly, pencil in hand.
2. Start daily tactics puzzles from week one and keep them going throughout.
3. Add an annotated game collection and read roughly one game a week, slowly.
4. Write down your own games, then review them afterwards and mark where a piece was left undefended.
5. Only once you understand why you are playing your first moves, add a short opening book.
6. Introduce a basic endings book when you start drawing or losing games you should have won.

Two or three books, worked through, will take you further than a dozen skimmed. Chess rewards depth of study in a way few hobbies do.

Where to buy, borrow and swap in the UK

Your local library is worth checking before you spend anything — chess titles are popular and often sit unborrowed. Chess clubs are the other obvious source: members accumulate books they are happy to lend or sell cheaply, and they will usually tell you honestly whether a title suits your level.

For new copies, the specialist publishers are Gambit, Everyman Chess and Quality Chess, all of whom sell direct or through the usual online retailers, and most good independent bookshops can order titles in. Second-hand is where the bargains are: charity shops, car boot sales and online marketplaces regularly turn up Chernev and Pritchard for a couple of pounds.

Two last tips. Check the notation before buying an older printing, and prefer a paper copy for puzzle books — writing in the margins is part of how you learn. A tablet is fine for reading prose, less so for solving.

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