Eric Schiller played for the University of Chicago team several times at the Pan-American Intercollegiate Chess Team Championship. FIDE awarded him the title of FIDE Master shortly after he reached a 2300 Elo rating. Since then, his rating has fallen. As of April 2009, he has a FIDE rating of 2166. He is also an International Arbiter.

Schiller has organized some chess tournaments. He has often been a news reporter, reporting on Chess Olympiads and World Chess Championship matches. Schiller was the arbiter for the Staunton Memorial tournament in London in 2005 and 2007, and the Gibtelecom tournament in Gibraltar.

Schiller has written over 100 chess books, more than anyone else except Fred Reinfeld and Raymond Keene.

Schiller's books have often received scathing reviews. Chess historian Edward Winter has criticized them for large numbers of spelling, factual and typographical errors, and even flagrant plagiarism. Schiller's Unorthodox Chess Openings famously received a two-word review from Tony Miles in Kingpin: "Utter crap." Carsten Hansen wrote of Schiller's book on the Frankenstein-Dracula Variation of the Vienna Game, "I have seen thousands of chess books over the years, but this book is by far THE WORST BOOK I HAVE EVER SEEN."

John L. Watson, who has co-authored three books with Schiller, considers some of Schiller's output to be well suited to its amateur audience. Watson wrote of Complete Defense to King Pawn Openings and Complete Defense to Queen Pawn Openings that "these books are explicitly aimed at the developing student, not the advanced player, and I think they both do a particularly good job of gently guiding an inexperienced player through a new opening. ... While Schiller probably deserves some of the criticism he gets, a consequence of writing too many books too quickly, he should also get credit when he does a good job." International Master Jeremy Silman wrote of Watson and Schiller's The Big Book of Busts, "I am forced to swallow my bigoted view of Schiller's work (or does this just validate my opinion of Watson?) and admit that this is a GREAT BOOK".