This book is quite simplistic and devoid of any strategic learning value to help you improve your games. If you are a beginner and seriously want to improve your chess with easy-to-read authors try Jeremy Silman's "Reassess Your Chess: Workbook", Bruce Pandolfini's "Russian Chess" describing six games move by move, Irving Chernev's "Logical Chess: Move by Move", and of course Aaron Nimzovitch's "My System".

This Samurai book tells you to "Seize The Initiative" as one of their strategies. True, but how to do it requires you to work and practice, and the guidance of good chess authors. -- I give it two stars because of it's inspirational value and innovative idea. It's not a boring read, just not a very useful chess book.

SAMURAI CHESS by Mr. Michael J. Gelb and Mr. Raymond Keene puts things in perspective for the neophyte chess player and gives one a basis of comparison with a familiar theme - the martial arts. I've poured through several chess books which were all too advanced and gave skant attention to a beginner chess player, but as a dedicated Judo and Jiu-Jitsu practioner, I was finally able to absorb some basic chess concepts through this book and the author's ability to draw a martial arts analogy. Yet the only flaw is that the Japanese already consider the Asian game of 'Go' a martial art equal to Karate or Kendo and they give those 'Go' players hard won Dan or Black Belt ratings; and this is hardly appropriate to Western chess, which is, after all, only a game!

Being on my school's Chess team, I'm exposed to many strategy guides. Although they can be helpful, they...are....DULL! Maybe I'm just not a serious-enough player, but I don't especially care for memorizing dozens of openings. I want general strategies. Samurai Chess does just that. Besides being a stategy guide, it's a pretty good read, giving insight to an alternative mindset for playing Chess. I could be biased, though, as I am in third-year Japanese and I love their culture.

This is very sad book with little merit. A perfect example of an author scamming the reading public. I wish there was some kind of publishing board that could review books and prohibit some from being published.

I bought this book because I loved Gelb's book by the same title (not the workbook). I was mildly dissapointed. My advice, skip the workbook and read How to Think Like Leonardo Da Vinci again!

Part of this book is for journaling and we've all heard how helpful journaling can be in different areas of our lives. That, however is not what I consider the value of this book.

Flip it over and you have the workbook part of the book. In this section the reader is made to sit down and think. Unlike journaling, where your mind takes you where it wants to go, the workbook gives us assignments.

For instance: Learning from Mistakes and Adversity (who doesn't want to do this?). This section encourages us to explore our attitudes toward mistakes by contemplating questions given. Following the instructions are two pages of questions that the reader must answer. In a word - it makes us think.

The work book also encourages readers to refine our senses. How often do we even consider doing this during the day when we have responsibilities piled upon us, clocks ticking the seconds away, and all the world'sgeneral confusion spinning around us? Not often!

I found this book enlightening, encouraging and helpful.