|
||||||||
|
|
||||||||
|
Chessville
Advertise to Single insert:
|
Decision-Making at the Chessboard reviewed by NM Dan Heisman
Ah, how to start? Should the opening line of this review be:
I think I will choose "Ah, how to start?..." OK, now that I have passed that test, it is true: there is no Introduction. But the title of this book, Decision-Making at the Chessboard, could mean many things. After all, every time you make a move you have to decide what to do, so I could only guess. The subtitle, "An experienced grandmaster penetrates to the heart of the chess thought process" was much more promising! As one who is always pursuing the thought process trail, I figured that this might be interesting. But it turned out a better title would be "GM Eingorn Presents his Most Interesting Games, But It Seems Like his Editor Thought it Would Never Sell, So Someone Made Him Throw in Some Games by Other Players and Tried to Make it Look Like Something Else." Now I don’t mean this to be unfair but, as a book author myself, I know how it is in the pursuit of the almighty dollar. Maybe Eingorn always intended to put in those other games, but they do look like an afterthought, and I am not sure how much they add to the book. Even the index of players is broken into two sections: "List of Viacheslav Eingorn’s Opponents" and "Games by Other Players" making that look like an afterthought, too. Well over 75% of the almost 100 games in the book are Eingorn’s. It is great when a player uses his own games as examples, but when it is this much, it is suspicious as to the original intent. The games chosen by Eingorn are, as to be expected, quite good. And that is to be expected any time a grandmaster selects his best or most interesting games. The annotations are, in general, at least adequate as well, and the diagrams are plentiful. In order to make it a book on "decision making", the games are separated by chapters according to theme, the eight themes being:
And the games, indeed, fit the chapters. The nagging problem that is left is that the annotations don’t really attempt to "penetrate to the heart of the chess thought process" except in the broadest terms. I would describe most of the annotations as normal, and only marginally oriented toward the thought process, as compared to other similar game books. Sometimes, for books originally written in a foreign language and then translated, this dichotomy between the title and content is not at all the author’s fault. It is possible it is not even the fault of the translator, John Sugden. It may be due to the publisher picking an English title he thought would sell best. For example, Robert Timmer’s excellent book "Castling to Win" is one of my favorites, but it is not at all about winning games – it about interesting facts involving castling. But someone thought that an indicative title would be unattractive, and instead gave it a misleading one, believing it would therefore sell better. In any case, without an Introduction and with just the title to guide me, I was expecting Eingorn’s book to be about thought process, but this is more just a collection of nice, but hardly remarkable, games. To be fair, my disappointment does not make this a bad book, and it is not. But it is hard to recommend a "nice" book when so many other great books are competing for the Chessville readers’ dollar. Each game ends with a little summary, showing the theme of the game and/or the lesson learned. Sometimes this was quite acceptable, as on page 106:
Translation: A premature attack is doomed to failure. Or, you can’t attack unless you have an advantage. Yet, a few pages later on page 121, things are not so clear in the summary (yes, I am printing the entire summary for this game so it will not seem out of context):
OK, now read that again and see if you do any better! Try reading it to someone else in your house, but don’t laugh while you are doing it. It goes without saying that this "loss of meaning" happens sometimes in translated texts. Such a gaffe, if it is one, doesn’t take away from the book too much unless it occurs too often. In Decision-Making the frequency of this type of problem is marginal: you can ignore it if the rest of the book is too good. Unfortunately, this book is not that good, so the lack of clarity does form a tangible drag on the reader’s pleasure. Lest you think I really hated this book, please don’t get the wrong idea: disappointed is a much better word. And I could find one really redeeming factor: Chapter 9. For the past few weeks I have been trying to help some students find positions to do what I call a Stoyko Exercise. Without digressing too much, what is needed are positions with some "meat" on them, where it is possible to analyze for an hour or two to test the limits of what you can see and know. Enter Chapter 9: Analyse This! Voila! Solution found: 18 ready-made problems just for that purpose! What could be more convenient or better? Of course, we may have to deduct style points for the translator for watching too many Billy Crystal/Robert De Niro movies, but that’s just gloss. Full originality points to Eingorn for providing interesting positions and subsequent analysis. Unfortunately, the inclusion of the Chapter 9 special position analysis leads to the issue that the book’s game analysis is not always the best. The first non-Eingorn game in Chapter 8, "Mindswap", is the famous Tarrasch-Lasker Game 4 in their World Championship match of 1908. In this game Lasker’s Rook lift is met by Tarrasch’s overzealous reaction, allowing Lasker to win. Yet Eingorn, before the critical stage of the game, only annotates ‘Here and subsequently, I reproduce Reti’s comments in shortened [!-DH] form.’ Eingorn’s quotes of Reti includes the following comment after Lasker’s move 23…Rd8: ‘This move exposes the weakness of White’s queenside and reveals the strength of the rook on c4.’ After the game, there is no comment about Reti’s annotation of the critical 23rd move from Eingorn, and the author only includes the game continuation to move 28, finishing at that point with ‘and Black won (0-1, 41)’. But the Reti annotation above, along with the lack of any comment by Eingorn, seems to imply that Black is already on the right track by move 23 - yet Black is not doing so well at that point! In Garry Kasparov’s My Great Predecessors, Part 1, Kasparov says that White is doing fine until that point, and he logically gives Tarrasch question marks on move 24, 25, and 26! Kasparov quotes Tarrasch about his mistake on the 24th move: "Up till now I had conducted the game irreproachably, but here I was seized by the unfortunate idea of a rook sacrifice, which in view of time-trouble I was unable to calculate properly." The only “?” or “!” marks Eingorn gives in the entire game is an exclamation to Black’s 27th move, yet no one can lose a game without making any mistakes! The author does not highlight either Tarrasch’s specific mistakes or Reti’s lack of severe criticism. So the Grandmaster’s inclusion of this famous game, rather than augmenting his case, actually provided a trigger in my mind that his annotations, at least in this easily discerned case, are less than optimum. Of course, this is only one sample, but I cannot help conclude that if you are going to buy just one of these two books, it should of course be Garry’s! Finally, I would like to recommend the correct reader level for Decision-Making. I would say that this book is best read by those with a solid positional and tactical foundation, so a 1600 minimum would seem about right. As with many chess books aimed at that level, it is not as if a 1400 player would not understand the book, but Eingorn’s level of annotation assumes a certain level of understanding, and a 1600 would probably meet that level. There is no maximum level, but I would find it difficult to believe that most masters would find the book very instructive – perhaps mildly entertaining. All in all, an OK book, but perhaps "Eingorn’s Best Games" by Eingorn would have been a better one.
|
The
|
||||||
|
||||||||
