A review by nostalgick
Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess by Bobby Fischer

2.0

Surprisingly, I'm disappointed in this book. Almost the entire thing is made up of 275 back rank checkmate puzzles of increasing difficulty. Back rank mating is a very important skill to learn, and I'm sure I'll be better at it now. The main problem is the puzzles are formatted in a way that's not very conducive to learning. The book presents a puzzle, tells you to find the correct answer (usually by picking yes/no and drawing the first move in a sequence), and then you turn the page to find out if you were right or wrong. So most readers would probably end up with a lot of incorrect answers scribbled onto their pages (I know I would have if I didn't use my eraser). You also have to flip the book upside-down halfway through to do the rest of the puzzles, which is a little bizarre but a more economic use of paper I guess. The principles are sound, of course, but there's nothing you couldn't learn from puzzles on Chess.com or other sites/apps these days. There's a select few anecdotes covering games that Fischer played, but they're never explored in any depth. I'm sure the book was indispensable in 1966 and for a few decades after. But it still makes a lot of top Chess book lists, which doesn't make sense in a world with much better learning tools and resources.