What is your favorite book about chess?

Adam Keeling ‏@MainStInvesting: what is your favorite book about chess?

Answer:

As the story goes, Laszlo Polgar had a theory about how to educate his children (and if his children or their friends read this, please correct me if I’m wrong). Home school them, teach them a variety of subjects, but at least 3-5 hours a day or more, they had to intensely study one subject. And in doing so from an early age, they will be among the best in the world. He put an ad in the paper looking for a suitable girlfriend / mate who agreed with his ideas. He found his wife. They then had to decide between two areas: tennis and chess. I don’t know why they chose chess instead of tennis. Maybe because tennis requires some things you can’t teach. Like a certain innate physical talent or strength. Whereas anyone can learn chess.

He had three daughters. Susan, Sofia, and Judith. All three were easily world champion level (for women) and Judith is, or was, in the top ten of the world for men. His idea worked. They all made a living from chess. They all became famous from it. The family thrived because of chess.

Part of his philosophy, it appears, was quantity over quality. Rather than give them very difficult chess problems (the way to get better at anything is to study prior situations of that field) he gave them bulk quantity problems. Some of them easy, some of them hard. The idea is that the more situations you see, the better your intuition gets.

He put them all together in a book called, “CHESS”. I find this to be the best book ever on chess.

Interestingly, another parent had similar ideas about educating kids. And he chose tennis. Richard Williams’ two children, Venus and Serena, are the two best women players in the history of tennis.