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Chessville
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When this CD first appeared, it received considerable flak from chess historian Richard Forster. What aroused his ire was the candid admission in the Introduction to the "All Games" Database. It stated:
The pertinent question is whether this confusion was avoidable. Edward Lasker was also a famous player in his own right, with a brief but well-documented chess career. He participated in the historic New York 1924 International Tournament along with Emanuel Lasker and also played a match with Marshall for the US Championship title. He also wrote a number of books including Chess for fun and chess for blood, Chess Strategy and last but not the least the wonderful autobiography Chess secrets I learned from masters. So it would not have been difficult to separate the games of the two Laskers. In the circumstances the publisher’s claim that the main database contains 1182 games of Dr. Lasker should be taken with a pinch of salt. As Forster points out, there is a reliable source for Dr.Lasker’s games. It is Ken Whyld’s authoritative work, The Collected Games of Emanuel Lasker (Nottingham, 1998). It contains 1390 games and fragments (In recent years even more games have been found, and they have appeared in volumes of Quarterly for Chess History). It also offers precise information about players, dates, moves etc. If only the ChessBase Editors had known this source and used it for reference, they could have eliminated a number of errors of omission and commission. Be that as it may, the value of this CD lies in the texts which carry fascinating tournament & match reports (by Albin Pötzsch) and also critical essays on Lasker.
However, one cannot help feeling that there is a pronounced bias in favour
of Lasker in the reports on World Championship Matches. Lasker was no saint. He was only too human in denying opportunities to his opponents in dethroning him. He was no less vain than his flamboyant rivals like Janowsky and Tarrasch. Their obvious human failings should not blind us to their sense of grievance against Lasker. We need an imaginative understanding of all contentious issues in those times. The multimedia section contains interviews with Averbakh, Baumbach among others and there also video clips from lectures held at the Lasker conference in Potsdam (by Huebner, Unzicker, Lilienthal, and others). Unfortunately, most of the experts speak German and this section would remain unintelligible to the rest of us but for Yuri Averbakh's presentation. In reply to a question on what the young Soviet players learnt from Lasker he states:
There is also a presentation of a game by Andrei Lilienthal, the only living grandmaster to have played against him. The game played in Moscow 1935 is a short draw. So the presentation is rather disappointing. Of the 1182 games in the database only 139 games carry annotations, and these are of varying length. Quite of a few of these games contain only wordless notes or carry very brief comment with just one or two short variations. This is in stark contrast to Emanuel Lasker, Second World Champion, CA CD* (Convekta) in which almost every single game is annotated in detail. The language and word format also present problems. In some games the German text has not been translated at all. For example, Alekhine's annotations to his game against Lasker (Nottingham 1936)appears in German. So are the annotations to the final game of the Lasker-Schlecter World Championship Match 1910. This is especially jarring to the English reader. In other places there is a curious mixture of words and chess symbols obscuring the point of the annotator. The annotations to games need a revamp in terms of language alone. Then they need to be re-examined in in the light of analytical discoveries made by moderns like Garry Kasparov and Mark Dvoretsky. A useful summation of such findings may be found in Andrew Soltis' book Why Lasker Matters (Batsford 2005). In all fairness it may be pointed out that this CD has detailed annotations by individual contributors like Johannes Fischer, Dorian Rogozenko, Rainer Knaak, Karsten Műller and Igor Stohl. There are also a couple of games annotated by Garry Kasparov which subsequently appeared in My Great Predecessors Part I. The subsequent debate on these games brought up a number of flaws in Kasparov’s annotations, with Dvoretsky pointing out that Kasparov had missed a mate in two in his analysis of the game Lasker-Steinitz World Championship Match 1894(7). Kasparov modestly acknowledged these errors and drew readers' attention to the incredible depth and complexity of Lasker’s games. Lasker's style wasn't understood by his contemporaries, and prejudice and misjudgment on his play persist until this day. In this CD there are six essays clarifying and illuminating the Lasker phenomenon:
It would be beyond the scope of this review to offer a detailed comment on each of these essays. Suffice it to say that they go a log way in deepening our understanding of Lasker at the height of his powers. It is a pity that there are no texts on Lasker's performance in 1930s, especially Zurich 1934, Moscow 1935 and Moscow 1936. The aging veteran held his own, not only against Capablanca, his successor, but also against rising stars like Euwe and Botvinnik. They would have given an idea of Lasker's form in his later years. In my view ChessBase should get its act together and come up with a revised edition with more archival and contemporary material. The following game is from the CD, and the notes are based on the annotations by GM Igor Stohl. However, I have also made grateful use of the commentary on the same game by Andrew Soltis in his book Why Lasker Matters (Batsford 2005).
Frank Marshall - Emanuel Lasker [A54]
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is bad for White. 
) 17.Bxe3 dxe3 18.Bxg6? hxg6
19.Qxg6 Nf8 (19...e2 ? 20.Ng5+-) 20.Nf6+ Qxf6 21.Qxe8 Qe6
