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BCM Chess Book Reviews : July 2003

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My Great Predecessors (Part 1) by Garry Kasparov, Everyman, 464 pages hardcover, £25.00.

This book arrived just as we went to press, so we’ve not had much time to consider it in detail. But the immediate impression is of a landmark publication. It is the first of a projected three volumes in which Kasparov appraises and annotates the games of earlier world champions. This volume considers leading players before the official world championship and then Steinitz, Lasker, Capablanca and Alekhine. The cover page lists Russian chess journalist Dmitry Plisetsky as “participating” in the book. We can only guess at the roles played by the two authors: Plisetsky may well have provided the historical context and researched earlier annotations, while Kasparov concentrated his energies on annotating the games and re-evaluating the work of earlier annotators. There is a quirky introduction, in which Kasparov tries to draw a parallel between the styles of all 14 champions (including Kramnik, but not the FIDE knock-out winners) and the times in which they live (a few of the Russian historical references will be lost on Western readers). This approach allows him to portray Karpov as the quintessential representative of the “stagnation” of Brezhnev’s era. Kasparov himself is linked to “perestroika”, of course. Then we get down to the main course: 148 games (including some part-games) annotated in depth by the world number one. Thankfully Kasparov does not give up too much space to ‘variation spaghetti’, realising that most of us can feed positions into a computer to find out how the immediate tactics work – just as he admits he does. Perhaps the most rewarding notes are the ones where he deconstructs the champions’ own comments and annotations. One omission has come to light, on page 373, in the game Alekhine-Sämisch, Berlin 1923: Kasparov overlooks 17 Nf5! which wins immediately.

Postage - £3.50 (UK), £5.00 (Europe), £7.50 (Rest of the World)
 

Tony Miles: 'It’s Only Me', compiled by Geoff Lawton, Batsford, 287 pages, £17.99.

It’s certainly a bumper month for books. It’s almost too good to be true to be reviewing this book in the same month as the new Kasparov work. Miles did write a couple of books in his lifetime, but never produced a book of his own best games, as did his English contemporaries Nunn and Speelman. It is desperately sad that we had to wait for his premature death before seeing a collection of his games in print. Though this book (with its anagrammatic title) was compiled by IM Geoff Lawton, with substantial help from other close friends including Mike Fox and Malcolm Hunt, it is as close as we can get to Miles’ own book. The collaborators drew on Miles’ previous writings in magazines and newspapers columns, as well as some unpublished material found amongst his effects at death. As well as Miles’ own annotations, they have included some excerpts of Miles the chess journalist and reviewer. And what a writer he could be: passionate, irreverent, acerbic, humorous, and quite terrifyingly honest. The book is rounded off with some very funny memories of ‘Miles the man’ and a few photos of him through the years. This is a book compiled by his friends and it is understandable that it doesn’t say much about the difficult, middle years of Miles’ chess career when his mental health definitely wobbled. But life restarted at around 40 and Miles’s life was looking up in various directions when he was taken from us. At the end you are left, not so much sad that he died, but more rejoicing that he lived. An utterly delightful read about an unforgettable character.


 

Bobby Fischer Rediscovered by Andrew Soltis, Batsford, 287 pages, £15.99.

Perhaps the most commonly asked for book in the BCM shop is Fischer’s My Sixty Memorable Games. Sadly this is out of print and likely to remain so for some time. Customers then ask for a collection of Fischer’s best games, but there is no one volume that fully fits the bill. There are collections and CD-ROMs of all his games but most customers don’t want all the games, they want a collection of the best. The volume under review meets this need admirably. It presents 100 annotated games, each preceded by a paragraph setting them in context. All the great Fischer games are here and, whilst the notes do not attempt any new perspective, they are adequate and comprehensive. Soltis highlights the fact that the Americans were just as much puzzled by the Fischer phenomenon as everyone else. Highly recommended for those who do not have a copy of Fischer’s My Sixty Memorable Games. Only the title can be criticized as Fischer cannot be “rediscovered” since he has never been lost. Review by Ray Edwards.

Smyslov’s Best Games, Vol. 1 (1935-1957) by Smyslov, Moravian Chess, 348 pages hardcover, £24.99.

Vasily Smyslov, who beat Botvinnik to become world champion in 1957, had a long and admirably consistent career at the top level, as the collection of tournament crosstables in this book shows. Volume Two will contain games from 1958 to 1995 – Smyslov (born in 1921) remained very active in tournaments until recently. In a brief introduction entitled “My Calling” he explains that in his youth he studied the many classic works in his father’s chess library, so that he traced the evolution of chess thought thoroughly, a path he recommends to all aspiring players. One might read the present book with just that purpose: it is instructive to see how strategies developed through the mid-twentieth century, in a spectrum of main-line openings since Smyslov used to switch between 1 e4 and 1 d4 (the opening notes have not been updated). On the other hand Smyslov’s style shows strong continuity – in his words, “at the age of 15-16 I used to play exactly as I do now”. He mentions his love of harmony in chess as in music, but the games themselves talk eloquently enough about that. Instruction and the “search for truth” aside, anyone who loves chess will be well entertained by this collection. Games against Botvinnik, Geller, Euwe and many others are annotated with the right balance between variations and explanations, with emphasis on logic and clarity.
   This edition contains 140 games (plus a few fragments), 52 of which were previously published with near-identical notes in a Cadogan edition of 125 Selected Games with the same translator. 88 games are new to this edition. The present volume is not cheap, but it is an attractively-produced hardback (albeit with pink covers). I’m looking forward to Volume Two. Review by James Vigus. Volume Two - click here.




 

French Defence 3 Nd2 by Lev Psakhis, Batsford, 287 pages, £15.99.

This is the first of a projected trilogy on the French Defence by Israeli grandmaster Lev Psakhis who wrote The Complete French for Batsford in 1992. Like Uhlmann, the author’s name is closely associated with this opening. Psakhis is really on top of his material and this is one of the best chess books to come out of Batsford in recent years. He doesn’t just serve up a database dump of all the latest games, but adds his own suggestions and assessments to a comprehensive survey of the Tarrasch French. A concrete example may be found in the shape of the game Rublevsky-Lputian, Poikovsky 2003, which happens to be analysed by Giovanni Vescovi in this issue of the magazine. So often opening books are out of date by the time they are printed, as a grandmaster unleashes a new move which blows the old theory out of the water. Happily, on this occasion, Rublevsky’s novelty is already in the book in the shape of an author’s suggestion. So, let’s award ‘five stars’ to the author (and his translator) for their work. Sadly, some shaky proofreading detracts from the overall effect. There are a number of typos, incorrect diagrams and notational inconsistencies, even on the back cover (where Judit Polgar is also promoted to ‘world no.1 player’). The indexing is barely adequate, and it can be very difficult trying to navigate your way round the numerous transpositions to which these systems are prone. But don’t be put off, the author has done a great job and it’s still a superb book overall.



 

Winning with The Trompowsky by Peter Wells, Batsford, 238 pages, £15.99.

If, like the reviewer, you are more ‘tromped against’ than ‘tromping’, it is annoying to be faced with a book about ‘winning with the Trompowsky’. When I play ...Nf6, it’s because I want to play the King’s Indian, not be molested by a tiresome bishop on g5, put there by an acolyte of a bunch of lazy English grandmasters who cannot be bothered to learn real openings. Haven’t we suffered enough? And how come nobody has yet penned ‘Trumping The Tromp’ for the benefit of Black players? Sorry... I don’t know what came over me there. Please forgive the cri de coeur. It has to be admitted, albeit through gritted teeth, that Peter Wells has made a very good job of assembling the latest theory on 1 d4 Nf6 2 Bg5. More than that, his exposition of the various ideas behind the opening are extremely illuminating. Wells tends towards the wordy, and this is a good quality in dealing with this ideas-rich system. Paradoxically, like many repertoire books, it provides a wider choice for the ‘other colour’ by sometimes only giving one line for the favoured colour. Consequently there is good material for downtrodden Black players to use to throw off the yoke of oppression placed on us by the evil Trompers. And there’s now an outside chance I’ll make the right choice on move two. JS.




 

Secrets of Positional Chess by Drazen Marovic, Gambit, 224 pages, £16.99.

This large-format book is divided into two parts. Part One deals with strengths and weaknesses in terms of space, squares, files and diagonals, while Part Two looks at the strengths and weaknesses of individual pieces. The professorial Marovic finds lots of examples to flesh out his examination of positional themes. It’s all sound stuff, no doubt, and good for the soul, but the reviewer gradually found himself drifting off into a world of his own, much as he did during geography lessons on balmy summer afternoons, at school in the 1960s... JS.

Super Tournaments 2002 by Sergei Soloviov, Chess Stars, 556 pages, £19.99.

This well-produced book includes 224 extensively commented games from the big tournaments of 2002. So you get all the games played at Corus Wijk aan Zee, the Ivanchuk versus Ponomariov match for the FIDE world title, NAO Masters (Cannes), Linares and the Dortmund Candidates. There is background information on each tournament, crosstables, plus short interviews with some of the participants. The team of annotators includes Khalifman, Sakaev, Shipov and Golubev, and the comments are mainly in reasonably-translated English. There are also 34 colour plates of the players in action at these events. An impressive and relatively inexpensive tome.







 

Mega Corr 3, Ed. Tim Harding, Chess Mail CD-ROM, £29.50.

Mega Corr 3 has doubled in size since the first CD-ROM was published by Chess Mail. 527,810 correspondence chess games (including about 6,000 game fragments) have been included on the database, in ChessBase and PGN formats. 30,000 of the games are annotated. To make full use of everything on the disk you’ll need a chess-playing program or database (for the games), a web browser and an Adobe Acrobat reader (for the textual and photographic material). There are back-numbers of Chess Mail magazine and a prodigious quantity of history and results of CC events, including crosstables of championships, photographs, etc..

The City of London Chess Magazine, Vol.2 (1875-6), Moravian Chess, 412 pages hardcover, £24.99.

After Staunton’s obituary in the first volume, there followed Cecil de Vere’s in the second. Once again, Potter is rigorously objective, in his assessment of a talented young player who threw up a good job in order to “enjoy himself” (the inverted commas are Potter’s).

The Chess Amateur, Vol.9 (Oct 1914 – Sept 1915), Moravian Chess, 380 pages hardcover, £24.99.

Europe was now at war, and chess players were trying to make sense of a world in which chess players were on both sides of ‘no man’s land’. Some irrational hatred and scorn was directed at “the stupid and cumbersome German notation. In future, the games will be entirely in the descriptive notation now generally in use in the British Empire, the United States, France and some other countries... instead of S for Kt, we shall use the letter N.” 90 years on we may reflect that we ‘won the war but lost the notation’.

The Chess Amateur, Vol.10 (Oct 1915 – Sept 1916), Moravian Chess, 380 pages hardcover, £24.99.

The continuing war is a constant theme, of course, yet there is still quite a lot of domestic and overseas chess activity to report despite the dearth of strong tournaments. Often frivolous, but one of the most endearing of the vast library of venerable reprints produced by Moravian Chess.


 

The Chess Amateur, Vol.11 (Oct 1916 – Sept 1917), Moravian Chess, 383 pages hardcover, £24.99.

Philip Williams, the whimsical problem editor, was forever shuttling between Hampstead and his country cottage in Buckinghamshire (perhaps to stop any invading force from getting their hands on his stockpile of killer two-movers?). Thus he had to keep supplying new addresses for correspondence. Earlier in the war he told us he was planning to dig a hole and fill it up with the necessary provisions in his country garden, while he kept his motorbike and toothbrush in London. Readers had only just jotted down one new address when he was back on the road, and struggling to fit his grand piano into a new house in Little Missenden. This homely detail is typical of The Chess Amateur but the chess comfortably outweighs anecdotes of domestic upheaval.


 

More Fun with Chess Miniatures by Robert Lincoln, US Chess Federation, 128 pages, £11.00.

Sub-titled 540 puzzles for Tyro and Veteran, this collection of two-move problems utilising seven pieces or less is by prominent US problemist Bob Lincoln who has had many problems published, including in the BCM. The format is six problems on the left-hand page, with solutions and commentary on the right.









 

Still More Fun with Chess Miniatures by Robert Lincoln, Self-Published, 128 pages, £11.00.

540 more two-move problems using seven pieces or less from Robert Lincoln. The author’s wide experience of his subject and his sense of fun shine through




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