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Chessville
Advertise to Single insert:
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Reviewed by Rick Kennedy
Now, I’m quite impervious to ads for “enhancement” nostrums or diet elixirs, and I’m not likely to suffer from male pattern baldness any time soon, but I’ve always been a sucker for claims of esoteric chess arcana. So I looked further. On the web site, Rick Adams breathlessly relates his search at a local bookstore for just the right birthday present for his son:
Of course, he didn’t stop there.
Mr. Adams is willing to share his discoveries with visitors to his website (www.smartchessmoves.com). As they say: But wait – there’s more! Purchase either of these books (in Adobe Acrobat, PDF format) and receive this bonus material:
I can fully understand if you’re skeptical. (In fact, that’s what Mr. Adams writes: I can fully understand if you’re skeptical…) One reaction to the offer, posted on the internet, called it a “terrible joke on the gullible.” Harsh words! We here at Chessville, chess amateurs though we may be, take our chess at least somewhat seriously, and feel a responsibility to our readers to investigate such things and help you decide – are we dealing with an “unbelievable offer, which will completely revolutionize your chess strategy,” or are we dealing with something akin to virtual snake oil? With the caveat, that what you see is what you get, and a peek at Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary (“puffery… exaggerated commendation esp. for promotional purposes: HYPE”) let’s see what you get… The little red book, it turns out (Adams is very straight-forward about this), is Freeborough and Rankin’s Chess Openings Ancient and Modern. First published in Great Britain 1889, this precursor to Modern Chess Openings (introductory text, columns of moves, footnotes) went through several editions (2nd edition 1893; 3rd edition 1896; 4th edition 1910) and eventually crossed the pond and was published in the United States. Although the version offered by SmartChessMoves.com does not bear a copyright date, the publisher is listed as David McKay, which would indicate that it is most likely the 2nd edition, published in 1905 (and reprinted by Hippocrene Books in 1974 – not so “lost” as one might imagine). As with many older books, it is in descriptive (e.g. 1.P-K4) rather than algebraic (e.g. 1.e4) notation. Anyone who has spent time reading about, researching, or playing opening lines which are not usually played by masters and grandmasters, which have fallen out of favor – and may even have fallen out of opening books – should be familiar with Chess Openings Ancient and Modern. It is cited many places, from Fletcher’s Gambits Accepted (another delight worth digging for), to the Myers Openings Bulletin, to the Internet-based Unorthodox Chess Openings Newsletter. You can check out the book’s table of contents at the website. While it seems a bit skewed to refer to the book’s contents as “chess lessons,” except in the metaphorical sense, Chess Openings has a reasonable amount of “all but forgotten” material, mostly King Pawn Openings, some of which probably should be forgotten (e.g. my favorite chapter on the Jerome Gambit) and some of which should be quite playable at the friendly or club level of competition. The fact is, if you are looking to improve your chess by using cutting-edge, up-to-the-minute lines of play, your best bet is still to go with the Informants, New In Chess, ChessBase Magazine, or, at the very least, Nunn’s Chess Openings – but if you’re playing the Royal Game at a much more pedestrian level, you are going to find things to surprise your opponent in Freeborough and Rankin’s masterpiece. It will not serve as your all-around source for opening knowledge (it’s lightweight on 1.d4 d5, and flyweight on the Indian defenses), but All is new that has been forgotten will be part of your new strategy. You will be in good company, too. Frank Brady, in Bobby Fischer Profile of a Prodigy wrote about young man’s chess library:
The second book offered on the website is Freeborough’s 1898 Chess Endings, which the author himself sees as “a companion” to the Openings book. (You can see the table of contents on the website.) Here, I cannot be as enthusiastic. There are any number of equally-accessible but much more modern resources – A Guide to Chess Endings by Euwe and Hooper quickly comes to mind, as does a personal favorite, Grandmaster Secrets: Endings by Soltis – and if I were going to only have one comprehensive endgame guide, it would be something that was a century more advanced, like Fundamental Chess Endings by Mueller and Lamprecht. Another important issue is that Chess Endings, like Openings, is a collection of PDF files created by scanning the original hard cover book. While the use of descriptive notation (vs algebraic) can be managed by most chess players, the poor quality of many of the diagrams (some of which manage to be both too light and too dark at the same time) quickly becomes a sizeable annoyance. In sum, Freeborough’s Chess Endings might be for you if you want to have a copy of a reasonably good but rather-hard-to-find endgame book – for “old time’s sake,” perhaps. If you’ve been playing chess without any knowledge of the endgame, this book will revolutionize your play – but that could be said about any endgame book. Otherwise you would be wise (if only for your eyes) to look elsewhere. Chess Openings Ancient and Modern and Chess Endings are downloadable from the www.smartchessmoves.com website for $14.95 each. They can be purchased together for $22. If you would like to sample each book, the website gives you the option of signing up for free to receive three parts of each e-book to be mailed to you at your e-mail address. But wait, there’s more… I don’t want to forget the Bonus material! Bonus #1 is an excerpt from G.D.H. Gossip’s The Chess Pocket Manual: A Pocket-Guide for Beginners and Advanced Players (again, scanned from the original and available in PDF format). The first edition of the Pocket Manual was published in 1894, the second in 1908. The one in question here bears a 1916 publication notice, but it is hard to tell if it is a newer edition, or a reprint of an earlier one. In any event, the Bonus material is provided as basic instruction on the Royal Game. The selection is from the first part of Gossip’s book, including an explanation of how the pieces moves, their relative values, a glossary of technical terms, and a list of the Laws of the Game. Absent is Gossip’s section on opening lines (rats! – but Adams confided that there was nothing on the Jerome Gambit, alas) and any of his “famous” games. (Reportedly Gossip had a habit of publishing games against contemporary masters, in which he had dispatched them with a vengeance. Only problem: the games never took place.) That the Laws are aimed at beginners is reflected in several notations:
Or perhaps they just reflect antiquity, as in the following excerpt regarding pawn promotion and the “dummy pawn” rule:
If you were purchasing Chess Openings Ancient and Modern and Chess Endings for a neophyte chess player, tossing in The Chess Pocket Manual for a basic grounding on the rules would have some use, as long as you pointed out – before your player joined a club or tried a tournament – a few places where the modern rules now differ. Bonus #2 is a PDF booklet titled Chess Master Secrets Vol. 1. It focuses on four tips to improve your play, using master games to illustrate. It assumes you know the rules of the game and can follow algebraic notation. (For some reason, the figurine algebraic font did not fully display on my machine, leading to things like: 18.¢d2 ¥g4!!) Bonus #3 is a nifty screensaver that allows you to display live games from the www.instantchess.com web site. Details are at that site. My own personal warning: if you install the software, then find yourself constantly staring off into space instead of keying anything, so that the screensaver is constantly coming back on – for productivity’s sake, or that of your paycheck, return to your standard flying Windows (except for coffee and lunch breaks, of course). Note: if your computer is connected 24/7 to the Internet, the screensaver is likely to be able to access games continuously. If you are on a dial-up service, however, and you haven’t dialed up… Bonus #4 is a few PDF pages on Thirty Chess Rules for the opening, middlegame and endgame. Mind you, these are not “rules” as in how a piece moves, but “rules” to govern your own play. If you were in a debate, they would be considered “talking points.” In a chess battle, they might be considered “thinking points.” The list is modified from rules presented in Reuben Fine’s Chess the Easy Way (1942). New and developing players should tack a copy to their bulletin board, or paste it to their mirror, for constant reminder. Note to Rick Adams: if you run across Chess the Easy Way in the used book shop, be sure to pick it up for your son. As my buddy, Perry the PawnPusher, wrote in his game collection, The Penultimate Perry: 400 Games:
Final Verdict: Chess Openings Ancient and Modern
If you have no Openings resource ? Chess Endings
If you have no Endgame resource ? Bonus stuff (free)
For beginners
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