Book Review: Perpetual Chess Improvement

A 200-proof distillation of over 300 hours of interviews with chess professionals and amateurs into practical chess improvement advice for people who have actual life responsibilities.

I asked Ben for a review copy and he was generous enough to send me one. He also has a Substack you should check out:

Perpetual Chess Link-Fest

Who is this book for?

The first words in Perpetual Chess Improvement (named in like manner to the Perpetual Chess Podcast, whence most of the content of this book originates) explain the accidental invention of the sometimes-maligned phrase “adult improver”, which refers to people aged 18+ trying to get better at chess, usually starting this journey for the first time as an adult. Why would such a term come into the lexicon of chess players on social media? Perhaps it’s because getting good at chess is really hard to do, and the older you are, the more likely you are to have commitments to other things which limit your ability to practice chess.

By and large, “adult improvers” like me struggle to improve, and the difficulty of this struggle tends to increase with age. It’s harder to get stronger the older we get. We’re never going to break records, and the accomplishments we do manage to achieve will always pale in comparison to what happens in the top-performing circuits. We’ll never be world champions. Barely any of us will become even local champions at our clubs. There’s always the next rung on the rating ladder. And standing behind us, in child-sized shoes, are the youngsters ready to take us down and bump up their own ratings in the process.

But for one reason or another, chess represents the kind of life-long challenge that attracts many grown-ups, and the game’s famous longevity is constantly being rediscovered by new and returning players who want to do what they can to do hard things, like getting better at chess. For many of us, it is a personal journey of self-improvement simply being reflected in our pursuits to get better at an abstract strategy board game.

This is one of many reasons why the Perpetual Chess Podcast’s Adult Improver series has struck a chord with so many. Ben explains in the beginning of the book that he never expected the outpouring of praise and downloads, but he had clearly stumbled on something great, as these are some of the most popular episodes, and the podcast continues to interview accomplished amateurs who are doing their best to get to their chess-related goals. It turns out that the average adult likes to hear from average adults when it comes to what they did to become better at chess.

But beside that, Ben has interviewed many masters and chess coaches who have done a myriad of things to get better themselves and to improve other people. Over the length of the podcast’s time on air the past six years, Ben has drawn on an estimated million+ hours worth of chess experience to bring to the reader everything that he has learned that others have learned.

Importantly, Ben, while holding the USCF Master title, seems to consider himself as part of the same audience listening to these interviews; he is just as much a student of his guests as the average Perpetual Chess Podcast listener. This means that his questions are really given from a grassroots perspective. He is an accomplished interviewer and knows how to ask the right questions to get to the real pearl core of chess improvement advice for his listeners. With this book, he has taken all that effort, and made it digestible and eminently readable. You don’t need a chessboard to read this book. It’s meant to be something you can read anywhere. It’s all about the advice. But, there are positions peppered throughout, and a full game score at the back of the book (and yes, I’m going to create a lichess study for it so people can look at those games on a digital board, so this review will probably get an update in the near future; Update: Here it is).

What is this book about?

If you’ve listened to every episode of the podcast before [raises hand], you’ve heard all this advice. But, you haven’t read it in such a succinct way without any additional “fluff” until you read this book. Ben selects the most incisive quotes given in the interviews and puts them on display. Like any good podcast host, he lets his guests speak for themselves, and draws heavily on their words to get any given point across. But also, Ben allows himself to be pinned down when it comes to questions that he’s historically been reluctant to answer. So if you, like me, are a big fan not just of the podcast but of Ben himself, this is a nice little treat on top of what is already a quintuple-layer chess improvement cake saturated with the syrup of sound advice. At the end of every chapter is a short, bullet-pointed summary, and Ben does a great job of double- or triple-distilling all that information into bite-sized chunks.

Perpetual Chess Improvement is structured into multiple parts. Each part is introduced with a few paragraphs and the structure of that part — you always know what’s coming up.

The first part deals with the core of chess improvement advice, which is virtually completely agreed upon by every person Ben has ever interviewed:

1. Play high stakes games that invest you in the process and result.

2. Analyze those games.

3. Studying tactics and calculation is key to becoming a stronger player.

4. You need a community: friends, mentors, coaches.

After these core tenets, the advice varies broadly both in what works and how it is emphasized, and that’s where the next three parts come in.

Part 2 is all about the more controversial side of chess improvement advice. Openings, endgames, master game collections, blindfold chess, blitz, and less-proven methods of studying tactics. Rather than use these chapters to push his own view on such subjects, he prefers to proverbially let his guests argue the case whether for or against them. You may find yourself nodding in agreement and then shaking your head contrarily in each chapter, as the advice between different guests on the podcast is often contradictory or mitigating. The takeaway from this part, that I think Ben succeeds at communicating: There is no one right way to get better at chess. You need to find what works for you and stick at it. If it doesn’t work, find something that does!

Part 3 takes us away from the chess board and focuses on what we’re doing there, in-between tournaments or other competitions. Discussions about ratings, tracking your training and habits, breaking through plateaus (which, in my experience, is largely psychological, not related simply to the games themselves), how best to study (and should you even worry about that?), what to do at tournaments (besides playing chess), playing against children, and taking care of our bodies. This was probably my favorite part of the book because the advice here, as Ben intimates in the introduction, may also be applied to life and simply make you a better person in general.

Part 4 handles the “tools of improvement” — advice on chess books (the perennial question!), websites, chess databases, using chess engines; and even avoiding information overload when using the extremely popular Chessable platform’s huge opening repertoires, or the virtually endless black hole of chess content that can be found on YouTube. Here, I think Ben gives more of his opinion than anywhere else, and the book is better for it! He makes many recommendations for books (and chessable courses) and ties them to rating ranges as well. Given that another segment of his podcast is my personal favorite, Chess Books Recaptured, in which he and a guest or two discuss and review a chess book, he is well-equipped to make many suggestions to the reader on which books he thinks are worth your time. Since modern chess books and courses are generally very good and equally pervasive, we have an embarrassment of riches to choose from. We are often, for lack of unlimited time, trying to find the highest karat content to work with — Ben does his best to help us by narrowing down the choices quite a bit and help us avoid option paralysis along the way.

Part 5 is a recap and conclusion as Ben gives his final thoughts before leaving us with a chapter containing all the games that had positions referenced in the book, index of names, final thank-yous, and the bibliography. If there’s anything Ben has a concern about, it’s avoiding burnout from too much chess or too-high expectations, so he wants the reader to walk away with just a little bit of caution when it comes to setting lofty goals. I appreciate the grounded nature of this conclusion, because it’s easy to hear stories of people achieving great things in chess, and to feel a compulsion to set the same requirements on ourselves. (I for one, have a goal to obtain the National Master title by 2031, and I’m still not sure it’s a reasonable goal). I get the feeling Ben would rather adults enjoy playing chess more than that they achieve some crazy goal, and he recognizes that such accomplishments are outliers, not the norm. He wants us to keep that in mind even as we do our best to improve at the game. It doesn’t make us any worse people to not reach the goals we aim for — we’re still worthwhile human beings even if we don’t obtain the heights we aimed for on the 64 squares.

Conclusions

Does all of this sound good to you? Does any of it? Then you owe it to yourself as a bona fide adult chess improver to pick this book up. If you’re a fan of the podcast, the choice to buy this book is a no-brainer! If you’re just someone (or you know someone) trying to wade through all the chess improvement advice which can be found anywhere and everywhere, this book is still the book I would recommend to you, simply because it takes a fair look at basically everything anybody with a worthwhile opinion has ever shared about chess improvement thus far. Ben is even-handed, he even sometimes shows his own personal hand in the process. You won’t ever feel like you’re being taken on a ride, but you will probably walk away with new information, new motivation, and perhaps a healthier and more balanced approach to chess improvement. In my mind this is already a future classic. If you already know the basics of chess and want to get better, this book is a great meta-guide to getting started on that path, or providing some course corrections, or reassurances, if you’re already on that path.

5/5