How to Win at Chess
by Levy Rozman
A clean, friendly on-ramp for sub-1200 players — just don't expect it to go deep.
- Status
- Read · February 2026
- Bought
- February 10, 2026
- For
- Adult beginners picking chess back up · Casual players stuck under ~1200 Elo · Anyone who learned moves from YouTube and wants structure
The one-paragraph verdict
Rozman teaches the way he does on YouTube: clear, patient, and genuinely good at sequencing the four pillars — openings, tactics, strategy, endgames — so a beginner isn’t drowning. The production is the standout, clean diagrams and fun-fact boxes that keep dense material from feeling like a textbook. The honest catch, echoed across reviews, is that it describes and shows far more than it explains and explores; topics arrive, get a tidy summary, and move on. That’s fine at 600 Elo and frustrating at 1300, which is roughly where the book stops being useful.
Who should read it
Adult beginners and casual players parked under ~1200 — especially anyone who learned the moves from videos and wants a structured pass over the fundamentals. If you’re already past 1300, or you want the why behind the patterns rather than the patterns themselves, look elsewhere; this isn’t the book that gets you there.
Where it earned its place
There’s no platform tie-in here, and I won’t pretend otherwise. Chess is my deliberate counterweight to staring at distributed systems all day — a board where the failure modes are mine alone and there’s no on-call. This book gave me a cleaner mental checklist for the opening and middlegame, which is exactly the small, repeatable habit I wanted from it.
Skip it if…
You’re an intermediate player hunting depth, annotated master games, or rigorous explanation — you’ll outgrow it in a weekend. [How to Win at Chess on Goodreads]