The Lasker Method to Improve in Chess

A handbook for club players today. Based on the famous approach of the legendary former world champion Emanuel Lasker.

Many club players think that studying chess is about accumulating as much information in your brain as possible. Most textbooks support this notion by emphasizing the importance of always trying to find the best move objectively. As a result, amateur players spend too much time worrying about subtleties that are really only relevant to grandmasters.

Emanuel Lasker, the second and longest-serving World Chess Champion (27 years old!), understood that what a club player needs most is common sense: understanding a set of timeless principles. Amateurs should not waste energy on memorizing, they should only strive to understand well the basic elements of attack and defense, tactics, positional play and endgame.

Chess instruction must be efficient because of the limited amount of time that amateur players have available. Superfluous knowledge is often a trap. Lasker himself, in fact, also studied chess considerably less than his contemporaries.

Gerard Welling and Steve Giddins have created a comprehensive but compact manual based on Lasker's general approach to chess. It allows the average amateur player to adopt reliable openings, achieve a solid middlegame and have a basic knowledge of endgame technique. Welling and Giddins explain the principles with carefully selected examples from players at different levels, some of them from Lasker's own games.

The Lasker method for improving chess is an effective set of tools and an entertaining guide. After working with it, players will dramatically improve their skills, without being burdened with the excess baggage many of their opponents will struggle with.

Gerard Welling is an international master and an experienced chess coach from the Netherlands. He has contributed to the NIC Yearbook and Kaissiber, the freethinker's magazine on chess openings. In 2019, Welling published, along with Steve Giddins, the successful chess opening guide Side-Stepping Mainline Theory.

Steve Giddins is a FIDE master from England and an experienced chess writer and journalist. He compiled and edited The New In Chess Book of Chess Improvement, the New In Chess magazine's best-selling anthology of master classes.