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BCM Chess Book Reviews : November 2001Return to the BCM Review Index
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The first volume of this two-volume work was reviewed in BCM, July
2001, and, to save you the trouble of looking it out, it’s fair
to describe it as a ‘rave review’. Since then, Volume One has
gone on to pick up the British Chess Federation’s prestigious ‘Book
of the Year’ award. The citation seems to indicate a unanimous decision
on the part of the three BCF judges.
What was so good about it? Well, for one
thing, Korchnoi has been around for ever, and played and beaten everyone,
from the stars of the 1950s through to players who are on the verge of
being stars of the coming decades of the 21st century. He is also a player’s
player. He makes no claim for genius, though if that appellation were
bestowed for hard work and tenacity, he would surely line up alongside
the Fischers and the Kasparovs. He is also very human, with a blend of
warmth, devilment and (occasionally) just plain bloody-mindedness that
remind us of ourselves and other players that we love and hate. The beauty
of Volume One was that it was all there, warts and all, with the annotations
depicting the grim struggle, inevitably scattered with errors, that is
typical of grandmaster chess.
What we have in Volume Two is more of the
same – but no-one is complaining. Korchnoi has chosen 50 of his games
with Black, from 1952 to 2000. Once again the temptation is to go straight
to the index to find a game against his old enemy, Karpov, to see what
poison darts he has aimed in his direction. Sure enough, amongst the annotations
of Korchnoi’s win against Karpov from Dortmund 1994, one finds adorning
his own 13th move the following comment: “Frankly speaking, this
looks a bit unsound positionally, but these days, when the World Champion
habitually takes his life in his hands by depending on his miserable King’s
Indian, a smaller fish can surely also attempt to violate the holy rules
of positional play”. But this is amazing: is Korchnoi really according
Karpov the title of ‘world champion’ at this time? Not a hope
– he “remembers”, in the next paragraph... “What I
mean is, the former World Champion Garry Kasparov hardly believed himself
in the virtues of the King’s Indian, although he often played it.”
Korchnoi is not quite the same sort of player
with Black as he is with White. He stresses that he is rather old-fashioned
about his black opening strategy, not being a regular exponent of the
King’s Indian or the Pirc or other ‘nihilistic’ ways of
playing with Black; though there are notable examples of this approach,
such as a win against Fischer from Curaçao 1962.
Korchnoi excels at self-deprecating humour.
In one game Planinc follows some King’s Gambit analysis, in a line
which the annotator had ended with a ‘plus over equals’ verdict
to White. The annotator was Korchnoi himself! But Korchnoi the annotator
and Korchnoi the player are quite different specimens. “Without suspecting
anything, with my next move I refute my own analysis!”. As he puts
it, “a mistake in analysis may go unnoticed, whereas an error in
a game may be punished immediately by the opponent! And, as a result,
analysis is often inferior in quality to practical play”. True enough,
but do we really believe him? Such is the man’s devilish sense of
fun that we have to suspect him of setting Planinc up, and then kidding
us that it was all an accident. Half the fun of the book lies in trying
to guess when he is for real and when he’s gently teasing the reader.
Of course it’s a superb book. No more need be said in its praise...
if you buy the November 2001 BCM, you will find a pre-publication extract
of this book, featuring Victor Korchnoi's annotation of a win against
Bobby Fischer from Curacao 1962.
Non-chess players often like to butter up chess players by telling us
how terribly rational our game is. “There’s no luck in chess,
is there, not like a card game!” they tell us, thinking to pay our
game a compliment. Normally we meekly concur for the sake of politeness,
but what we really want to do is scream “You must be joking!”
and then recount the most recent instance of fortune failing to smile.
As the author of this book is at pains to point out, a lot of what we
call ‘luck’ can be explained away as ‘bad play’, though
there are ways and means to turn the tables on our opponents to make them
play badly. This is a practical guide for the club player in encouraging
the opponent to go wrong, and avoiding the usual psychological pitfalls.
Most of the material is taken from club
and county level chess, up to the author’s own standard (around FIDE
2250). LeMoir draws upon many of his own games over more than thirty years,
and here he can set the scene with much anecdotal material. Particularly
amusing was the ‘Swinging Sixties’ game in which the mini-skirted
charms of two female spectators play an important role. You’ll have
to buy the book to find out more about that one. He is also fond of aphorisms,
and here he casts his net very wide; apposite quotations are cited ranging
from those of eminent chess players to a famous golfer, and even one found
on a toilet wall. This is a very enjoyable read for the club player, and
is much enhanced by the illustrations which were provided by the author’s
father, who is a freelance cartoonist. The reviewer can vouch for the
credentials of LeMoir as author of this title, having lost on time to
him in 1980 after adjourning a game a clear pawn up. But I’m over
it now. Really.
This is the second edition of this Informator publication which
is scheduled to appear three times a year (like its parent title). The
first volume was reviewed in the July 2001 BCM (page 366). Once again
the top twelve names are taken from the FIDE Rating List (in this case
the July 2001 edition). These are: Kasparov, Kramnik, Anand, Adams, Morozevich,
Ivanchuk, Leko, Bareev, Gelfand, Topalov, Shirov and Kasimdzhanov. The
‘Plus One’ of the title is the same as last time, Judit Polgar.
It seems that this was always the publisher’s intention and they
recognise that they will have a problem if Polgar moves into the top 12.
There is a brief textual intro for each player, then the games played
in the relevant period are given, unannotated. 50 pages are then given
over to a statistical survey of each player’s performance, then 27
on opening theory, followed by the players’ unrated games from the
period in question.
As per the sub-title, this work covers the most critical lines of the
French, including the Winawer, Classical and MacCutcheon variations. That
might not have been true a few years ago, but at the moment players like
Shirov, Morozevich and Short are continually peddling their French defences
all round the world, so it has become trendy. Players of the white side
have not been inactive either, with Anand being the most prodigious ‘French
murderer’ of the last couple of years. Even lines such as the Burn
variation (3...Nf6 4 Bg5 dxe4) have been in vogue. As well as old variations
which have been revamped, there have been some brand-new systems springing
up in the last few years, such as the line that Pedersen calls the Shirov/Anand
variation (3...Nf6 4 e5 Nfd7 5 Nce2). All this receives thorough coverage
in Pedersen’s excellent book. Some opening books only appeal to those
interested in playing them, but this well-written book is about systems
that generate rich and varied types of position. So it will also be of
interest to those who appreciate ‘real openings’ and the evolving
battle of ideas between great chess players.
Stein is one of the forgotten great players of chess history. No doubt
this is due to his three failures to reach the Candidates’ tournament.
But in his prime in the 1960s he won the USSR Championship three times,
and two of the strongest tournaments ever held, Moscow 1967 and 1971,
amongst others. He died young at 38. Ray Keene wrote a worthy tribute
in 1976: Leonid Stein Master of Attack (Tui Enterprises), now out
of print. Despite this, his name is virtually unknown today.
It is therefore encouraging to see a publisher
presenting a worthy tribute to Stein. The introductory biography is interesting
as it shows that it took Stein a long time to establish himself in the
higher echelons of the game. He broke through in his first USSR championship
at the age of 28. After that for a mere 11 years until his fatal heart
attack there was no stopping him. He was not a theorist like Geller or
an artist like Keres or Tal; his strength lay in the extraordinary power
of his piece play which swept his opponent away with a never-ending series
of blows across the board. The impact on the opponent was made worse as
Stein often played at great speed.
There are 61 games in the book and they
well illustrate what an amazing player Stein was. They are annotated by
Gufeld in his easy, flowing style, but at times somewhat superficially.
For example in the game that made Stein famous, his victory over Petrosian
in his debut USSR Championship, Petrosian’s failure to play 18...Ba4
preventing the winning pawn sacrifice 19 a4 is not mentioned. Similarly
Stein’s elemental tour de force against Krogius (game six
in the book) is written as if Stein’s sacrifices won automatically;
see the analysis in Burgess et al’s The Mammoth Book of The World’s
Greatest Chess Games for an alternative version. At other times Gufeld
seems to be word-spinning; e.g. at the diagram in game 52 he writes, after
22 Rxe7+: “The rook sacrifice was yet another argument proving the
middle game was in full swing.” Where else would we be by move 22,
with pieces scattered across the board?
Nonetheless, despite these small grumbles,
this book can be thoroughly recommended as a splendid tribute to an outstanding
player. Anyone who buys it and plays through these great games is in for
a treat. Review by Ray Edwards.
The title is very misleading. This CD-ROM is a collection of Grandmaster
Daniel King’s articles written for ChessBase Magazine over
the course of the last five years, and there is nothing about any ‘English
Chess School’ (is there such a thing?). It is not intended to be
a course of instruction, but constitutes a varied range of articles which
Daniel says he wrote mainly for his own amusement. They have been carefully
divided up into logical chapter headings: king, queen, minor pieces, pawns,
attack, tactics, opening ideas and mixed. Each of these chapters is sub-divided
into sub-chapters which each have around 20 or 30 annotated games illustrating
the theme. There is a video introduction from King himself, plus another
video intro for each chapter. The ‘mixed’ chapter even gets
onto the vexed question of whether Michael Owen or Teddy Sheringham was
the best partner for Alan Shearer in England’s soccer team in the
1998 World Cup. King is the ideal ‘frontman’ for a production
such as this, showing a relaxed and humorous style in front of the camera,
and providing clear and illuminating textual commentary on the selected
games. With his blend of easy charm and good sense, one is even tempted
to dub him the ‘Peter Alliss of chess’. The chapters are linked
together seamlessly and navigation could not be simpler. The reviewer
used ChessBase 7 to read the CD-ROM and experienced no technical problems.
There is no need to own any chess software at all, as the necessary facilities
for using the CD-ROM come installed on it.
The sub-title describes the book: “The Life and Games of Cecil De
Vere, First British Chess Champion”. Written by the two authors,
but involving support from most of Britain’s chess historians (including
Bernard Cafferty and Ken Whyld), this is a quite fascinating volume despite
the virtually unknown subject. For a start there is quite a mystery about
DeVere. Why did he change his name from Brown when his mother died? Why
did he go to Torquay to die? Why did other De Veres leave Torquay the
day after he arrived? And what happened to the memorial obelisk, raised
by public subscription, which vanished from the cemetery?
This well-produced book brings the Victorian
1860s vividly to life with excellent photographs, well-selected extracts
from the papers of the day, together with 101 lightly-annotated games
by De Vere. It is a must for all chess historians, but also interesting
for the general reader who will enter a chess world very different from
today.
And how should the question contained in
the title be answered? It is true that both Morphy and De Vere died young
in tragic circumstances, and that De Vere was a talented player with an
easy all-round style, but he was also indolent, alcoholic and a consumptive.
As a result he never ranked with the best in the world, whereas Morphy,
in the few years he played chess, dominated every player he ever met.
The similarity is in their fate, not in their chess talent. Review
by Ray Edwards.
Publishers are increasingly moving the blurb to the front cover and this
latest offering is no exception, as the sub-title goes on: “A unique
self-training course in the essentials of chess”. Jesper Hall is
well-qualified to do this as he trains the 30 most promising young chess
players in Sweden. As a result he has worked out what’s important
and what isn’t in practice. Hall’s approach is much more down-to-earth
and less analytical than the famous Dvoretsky series and I would certainly
recommend this book before embarking on the famous Russian trainer’s
manuals.
A welcome feature of this book is the attractive
lay-out with the use of cartoons, no doubt aimed at attracting the young
reader; but I feel the book will be even more valuable for anyone involved
in training children. This was demonstrated in the BCM Chess Shop by one
harassed father, with a precocious chess child in tow, who bought the
book for his own use, in order... “to have some idea of what I should
be doing!” Review by Ray Edwards.
In the November
2001 BCM: an exclusive extract from Volume Two of
Victor Korchnoi's Best Games, plus review... Korchnoi: My
Best Games Vol. 2 - Games With Black, Olms, 202 pages, £19.99
from BCM