I recently went over this book. I only skimmed over most of the book and read only a few sections fully. This book offers a plan and method of studying your games. If you already are doing some work which is improving your game this book will not be of use to you.

If you want to learn anything you need to put enough time and work hard for it. I do not find the methods in the book interesting. It may be efficient. But not fun. Preparing flash cards and going over it seems to be not so much fun way to learn a game. I want to enjoy it while playing and learning. That is my first goal. Improving is second however slow it is. Going over games and solving tactics problems were the two main ways I have been studying and it has paid well until now.

It took four months for me to finish this book. I cannot say finish in the real sense. You cannot finish this book in one go. There is so much analysis for each game it is hard to finish one game in a single sitting.

Contrast to Alekhine’s Best Games book or Tal’s Life and Games book, this one is filled with analysis. My habit for these books used to be, to make the moves on the board only for the main line and then try to go through the variations in the book mentally. This task was much easier with Alekhine’s games and Tal’s games because most of the lines were forced or they gave only 1 or 2 variations. I could not do that with this book. The variation trees some times take 4 or 5 branches and some times go more than 10 moves deep. Most of the times when at the end of the variation if the result is unclear then I skipped that variation. That is why I did not really finish this book, but went over the main lines and most sub variations of all the games.

To get such thoroughness in a chess book is rare. Alekhine’s and Tal’s books have helped me improve my game a lot. I need to read this book second time to fully understand the games and get real benefit.