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BCM Chess Book Reviews : March 2001

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Understanding Chess Move by Move by John Nunn, Gambit, 240 pages, £14.99.

I usually have three complaints about books on chess strategy. First, the games (if they are given in full at all) are old and the opening theory obsolete. This becomes more of a problem now that even my weakest opponents in league matches appear to have been studying with ChessBase all day while I’ve been working; I really don’t have time to study opening theory and chess strategy separately. Second, the themes are illustrated with games that make it all look too easy (often the loser has more than one problem and the winner was a much stronger player anyway). Third, it’s usually me with the bad pawn structure, lame knights, and bad bishops, and I would prefer to learn how to grovel my way back to victory.

This book meets all my demands. Nunn presents 30 recent games between very strong and evenly matched players, in a wide variety of state-of-the-art openings. General principles are stated and demonstrated, but time and again Nunn stresses the need to examine the pros and cons of every decision carefully: there is almost always some trade-off between positional features and activity, which must be taken into consideration before you blithely double the guy’s pawns. He has written the book in such a way that players of all strengths will find it useful. For beginners, there are lucid descriptions, in words, of the reasons behind every move. Intermediate players will find plenty of analysis to answer all their ‘what if?’ questions. Strong players will appreciate the insights into modern openings and chess theory. It will also be very useful for chess teachers, who can take the material in each game and select the relevant level to present to their students.

The aim of Gambit is to provide educational chess books. This is a valuable example: a complete instruction manual on contemporary chess. It makes a natural companion volume to Secrets of Modern Chess Strategy by John Watson (Gambit) and deserves the same acclaim. Review by Helen Milligan.




 

Mastering The Sicilian by Danny Kopec, Batsford, 128 pages, £13.99.

This book concentrates on the Sicilian from the point of view of the player of the black pieces, concentrating on the tactical themes, pawn structures and plans rather than hard analysis of lines, and pitched at the player who already understands the importance of rapid piece development and king security. Kopec openly admits that he is not a book specialist, but paradoxically this seems to improve the clarity of his explanations of the main Sicilian structures such as the Scheveningen, the Dragon, the Najdorf, etc. The book finishes with a brief consideration of “Closed” Systems – under which umbrella the author includes the Grand Prix Attack, Bb5 systems, his own Kopec System (2 Nf3 and 3 Bd3!? followed by c3) and the c3 Sicilian. He is surprisingly dismissive of some of these variations, giving an all-purpose defence against the true Closed Sicilian and little specific advice against the others. But all in all this is a very readable and well-organised primer for a club player considering becoming a Sicilian player.




 

Grand Strategy by Jan Van Reek, self-published, 144 pages, £10.50.

The front and back covers of this book are quite beautiful – being two striking and colourful Japanese prints – but the only clue that you are holding a chess book lies in the words, underneath the author’s name, “supported by Boris Spassky”. This is just the start of a series of jolts and jerks that lie in wait for the reader as he embarks on this weird and perplexing book. In what way did Spassky support the book? Well, he played in all 50 games contained within it, but we do not learn that he had some input to the book until a few pages in. The author (who disconcertingly refers to himself in the third person) claims that there are four previously unpublished Spassky annotations in it, resulting from some meetings between author and subject. Spassky supplied “his tactical wit” while Van Reek used computers to check the analysis. Frustratingly, it is not entirely obvious which is the new Spassky material in the skimpily indexed book.

There is no false modesty displayed here; the author tells us that earlier analyses by the likes of Kasparov, Karpov, Fischer and Botvinnik were “valuable but needed correction” and “most other analyses were useless”. Earlier we are told that “chess strategy made a leap forward in 1927 when Euwe wrote sagacious articles about pawns in the centre and the attack on the king and Nimzowitch published his system of prophylaxis”. We might be prepared to go along with that, but then, staggeringly, in the next sentence: “Van Reek completed, clarified and combined these approaches into a general theory for human and computer chess in 1997.” Utter tosh, of course: but if you skip the author’s irritating hyperbole in the game intros, and simply sit back and enjoy Spassky’s superlative games and the well-edited annotations, you might still derive a considerable degree of enjoyment from this maddening but interesting book.


 

The Seven Deadly Chess Sins by Jonathan Rowson, Gambit, 208 pages, £16.99.

The shops are full of self-help psychology books on stress and relationship problems, testifying to our general human state of dissatisfaction and unhappiness. Separate shelves are loaded with books on the right way to play chess. Rowson’s book is a startling attempt to combine the two, based on the premise that to know ourselves is to know why we lose chess games. He pursues the concept of ‘sin’ in chess through the fields of psychology, philosophy, physiology (brain function and awareness), and various other areas where I certainly don’t have the necessary expertise to comment. He ventures into physics, with a chess equivalent of E=mc2, but doesn’t quite reach quantum mechanics (I have elsewhere encountered the suggestion that chess becomes quantised towards the endgame, where the continuum of energy levels corresponding to moves and material reduces to a simpler atomic model with discrete levels corresponding to one pawn or one move...). In other words, this is a book that shows you chess from a new perspective, which may indeed be just the change in thinking you need to improve your game. Whether it will cure your problems with stress and relationships too is open to debate (I should add that it certainly does not claim to do any such thing!), but hey, if you’re winning games, life is good. Review by Helen Milligan.


 

Chess Knowledge Training Mastery by Boris Zlotnik, Bokan, 132 pages, hardcover, £14.99.

Another offbeat publication to emerge this month was this slim, hardcover tome emanating from Yugoslavia. Boris Zlotnik is a 55-year-old chess trainer from Moscow who now works largely in Spain. The English of the book is not good, seemingly learnt from having listened too long to the Fritz Talk CD-ROM. The title is a good example; even with two commas added (as on the title page) it seems to give little clue as to what the book is about. The subject is mainly that of mistakes, what type of mistakes players make and why we make them. The author classifies them into those made due to insufficient attention, lack of chess knowledge, miscalculation, lack of positional feeling, lack of imagination, etc.

All very logical, and well-exemplified, but instead of suggesting ways of combating mistakes, the author goes on to discuss some complicated tests made at the Academy of Sports in Moscow with resultant statistics presented in tabular format. The reviewer confesses he got very bogged down at this point: reminiscent of the lines of the “well-known poem by Kornei Chukovski” quoted on page 21: “Oh, how hard is the working out of mud a hippo digging.” The author continued: “At that moment I completely ceased thinking of chess.” So did the reviewer.


 

Killer Moves by George Renko, ChessBase, CD-ROM, £18.50.

This is a follow-up to the Intensive Tactics Course by the same author, and contains approximately 1600 positions for you to solve, to sharpen up your tactics. Computers are certainly convenient for presenting this kind of material, and 1600 is more than you would get in an average puzzle book. I think that players up to about 1800 (150 BCF) would find the positions challenging; players of 2200 (200 BCF) would see them as light refreshment. Review by Helen Milligan.









 

Check and Mate! by Daniel King, ChessBase, CD-ROM, £18.50.

The second edition of this CD-ROM contains ten games of the type where you have to guess the next move, along with annotated versions of the same games, and some supplementary material. This format is ideally suited to computer presentation—-if you’re using a book, you need a couple of other books to hold it open, and a few envelopes to cover up all the text you’re not meant to see yet. In addition, the computer adds up the score for you, so you can’t round the points up at all. If you make a wrong but not unanticipated choice, you will find that the computer (or rather King) makes helpful and encouraging comments. Contains numerous video clips of the author speaking to camera. Review by Helen Milligan.






 

School of Elementary Tactics by Martin Weteschnik, ChessBase, CD-ROM, £18.50.

There are two parts to the CD: a lengthy exposition of tactical ideas, drawing on approximately 350 examples, and a (shorter) set of exercises. All such material is useful for improving your analysis, of course, but I don’t think the author will get his lessons across without improving the English, no matter how great his enthusiasm for the subject. The descriptions of tactical motifs are very difficult to understand, having been translated into clumsy and obscure English. In places the choice of words makes the text meaningless. As with the King CD-ROM, the author appears in numerous video clips. Review by Helen Milligan.






 

All reviews by John Saunders except where otherwise indicated.
 

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