[2] In high school, he wanted to move to the Soviet Union and study chess, due to the game's popularity and the number of skilled players he knew there.

The preface to his Endgame Course mentions this, and fellow chess players Daniel King and Ronan Bennett allude to this in a newspaper column from 2007.

[1] He lived in London, Chicago, and Seattle for brief stretches before moving to Los Angeles, where he was based for the rest of his life.

According to Dana Mackenzie, the imbalances are, in roughly descending order of importance:[8] Silman proposes in How to Reassess Your Chess a five-fold procedure that he recommends that players use.

He died from primary progressive aphasia, a form of dementia, on September 21, 2023, at his home in West Hollywood, California; he was 69 years old.