Book Review: Evaluate Like a Grandmaster

A neatly straightforward puzzle book dealing with an under-appreciated skill in Chess.

A quick player profile about me: ~1700 USCF club player after competing for about two years. I would describe myself as relatively tactically strong, and almost OK strategically speaking. I feel like I can evaluate most positions with a decent ballpark estimate, but not as precisely as I’d like to.

I had been looking forward to this one since Nate Solon (also, if you’re a chess improver and you’re not following his Substack, what are you doing with your life?) first announced it on Twitter, and I picked it up soon after it was released on Amazon. My early edition had an error in the “annotation style” section that was fixed by the time I had noticed and asked Nate about this on Twitter. Even with that little issue, the book was plenty good and I’m happy with the purchase (It’s $9.99 USD on Amazon).

First off, the introductory example from the first exercise chapter. White to play. What’s your move?

Perelshteyn - Elbilia 1997

I’ll give the answer later.

On to The Review.

The idea of the book is pretty simple. Not everyone can calculate like a grandmaster, and there may be limitations to how deep and broad you can get with calculation skills, but equally as important, and possibly more practical to improve, is the ability to evaluate positions on the board or potentially in the near future. And, for one reason or another, there are not very many workbooks containing positions that you’re asked to purely just evaluate whether one side is better or worse. This means that Evaluate Like a Grandmaster sits in a nice niche with few other works (certainly none that I have ever heard of). That means, I think, this book will become increasingly and deservedly popular (it’s less than a year since its release, and it already has 76 ratings on Amazon with a 4.6 average as of June 20, 2023; many decent chess books don’t have that volume of ratings after many years of being in print).

The book’s introduction to explaining “evaluation” ends with this paragraph:

“Most chess puzzles deal with positions where the best sequence of moves leads to such a decisive advantage that evaluation isn’t really necessary: you’re either up loads of material or checkmating the opponent. But most positions in real chess games aren’t like that. They feature many possibilities where the evaluation is nuanced and murky. Navigating these positions skillfully is crucial for beating tough opponents. That’s what this book is about.”

In other words, this is not a tactics workbook. It’s a positional workbook, and the solution is in recognizing the important aspects of the given position(s) to make a choice regarding which move results in a better evaluation.

The introduction chapter contains brief but useful information about evaluation, and then gives the explanation and rationale for the types of exercises you’ll find in the book. To wit:

• Evaluation: Look at a position and determine who, if anyone, is better, and write down your suggested move.

• Visualization: Look ahead and evaluate. Write down your suggested move.

• Comparison: Look ahead and evaluate multiple positions. Which one is better? (They say this is the most realistic type of exercise and I agree.)

• Quartets: Look at four related positions and evaluate those. (This is nice for understanding how different piece configurations or pawn structures in similar positions can affect the evaluation).

For each of these exercises I would add that it may be helpful to keep your own notes about the position, so that you can compare yours to the authors’ notes and see if you’re focusing on the same things in your evaluations. The meat of the book is in the written explanations found in the answers sections after each chapter, so it seems most instructive to me that you actually write down all your “whys” so you can check for your own blind spots.

OK, now for the answer from the above example: Here’s what I wrote down as I evaluated the position:

“Black has no prospects. Whites rooks are active. The g-file is an issue for black. Blacks position is very passive. Suggested move: g4 to open the file and Rg1 to play on the file. Also Bc2 becomes an idea.”

The book gives g4! as the correct move, and goes into some detail about white’s future plans, including playing Rg1. I would label my answer as almost correct (I didn’t give an evaluation but I would have written “White is clearly better”). But what is really satisfying is understanding the written response that the authors give — especially if you were able to understand the position the same way they did. That’s the hook: Seeing how well (or not) you understand the position by comparing that to the authors’ answers. It’s instructive, but since these aren’t simple tactics solutions, it means reading the answers may take more time to assimilate into your understanding. Keep that in mind while you’re going through the book.

A lot of the examples are from recent play, especially from Perelshteyn’s games, which means that it helpfully avoids running into the typical historical prejudices about older positions that we may evaluate either too optimistically or pessimistically based on previous experience or commentary before the computer age of chess. This is also more practical since the positions arising are ones we are more likely to see today.

I tracked my progress in a Google Sheet as I was making my way through the book and made my own arbitrary scoring system based on whether I evaluated the position correctly and if the move I chose was correct. If I evaluated correctly and chose a good move, I got two points. If my evaluation was slightly off, or if I chose an inferior but still good move, I got one point. If my evaluation was entirely wrong, or if it was correct but I chose such a bad move as to rid myself of almost or all advantage, then I got a zero. My final score was 230/408, or about 56% correct. In other words, my evaluation could use some work! This is not surprising, since I am a Class-B player. But some of these positions were also misevaluated by players as strong as Magnus Carlsen. So, perhaps I’m not in the worst company!

In this book there are a total of 204 positions to evaluate. I found the workload not too heavy. In fact, it feels kind of light, since you don’t have to go deep in calculation-mode in order to find the solution. You just have to look at the position and think about it for a few minutes (the authors themselves suggest that this is all it should take to evaluate a position as the returns diminish greatly beyond that amount of time). I track my time when studying everything and I put about 12 hours into this book over two weeks to complete it — roughly an hour a day.

Do I think it’s made me a better player? I’m not sure yet, but I’m certain it hasn’t made me worse. It has definitely helped me to get into the habit of evaluating positions more of the time; and one major benefit is recognizing some flaws in my positional thinking, since when I misevaluated something, the answers were genuinely informative and helpful in making me see why I was wrong. I really do think the best part of this book are the answers, which is why I stress that you should take notes about your evaluations and compare these with the authors’ given answers. Another little benefit (for me) is that I’ve learned habitually to try evaluating positions whenever I see them, and this can be fun when I evaluate some live master game, and then turn on the engine to see if I was right. Pretty satisfying when I’m correct, and educational when I’m wrong.

Do I have any issues with the book? Mostly, nothing that isn’t germane to all physical books, like the inconvenience of setting up a position to look at the solution’s lines, and also to check the engine’s suggestions when my answer was not listed in the solution as either right or wrong. For that, I compensated by using the ChessVision.AI app on my phone. I can’t knock a book for being a book; I’m just used to using a lichess study board or Chessable. If you use physical books all the time, then this won’t bother you at all, I’m sure.

Another thing about this book is that it cannot be all things to all people. I am not sure if a player at Expert or above strength would get very much out of this book, but I’m also not sure it was made for people like that. YMMV.

Lastly, I think this book could have more exercises dealing with things like evaluating whether to enter a strategic endgame. There are lots of exercises in the opening phase, and many in the middlegame phase, but almost entirely absent were positions in which a possible strategic endgame could occur and needed to be evaluated. Maybe that is outside the intended scope of the authors, but it does strike me as a missed opportunity in a book like this.

Overall, I would still recommend Evaluate Like a Grandmaster because it fits a niche not many other books do, the exercises and answers are very instructive, and it can only benefit your ability to assess positions and whether to choose to enter them in real-life games. Plus, it’s not too heavy a workload, and it’s ten bucks for a pretty unique entry into the wide world of chess puzzle books.

4.5/5