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Chessville
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To be honest, I find this book very difficult to review. Why? Because, as I went through it, I could see that Marin had invested a lot of time and energy into the material. There were lots of deeply annotated games, some played by Marin and others by strong GMs. There were lots of diagrams, and even paragraphs of the author’s thoughts about chess and the games themselves (something I really like in a book) and yet, for some reason, I just couldn’t “connect” with the material. For days this book vexed me as I would lament to my friends over the phone that “I could see it was a good book, but I just couldn’t get into it.” And each time I attempted to write my review, I would give up in frustration as the words just didn’t express how I truly felt. Finally, I realized I just had to come clean. The truth was that I personally found the book wasn’t my cup of tea, but could understand how other chess players, especially higher rated ones, could get a lot out of it. See, the problem for me is that as a reviewer, I have always felt that I had to have a strong opinion about a book. That I owed it to the readers at Chessville to tell them which books, in my opinion, are good and which are the dogs, as there is nothing I hate more than a “wishy-washy” review. You know, the kind where at the end of it you’re still not sure whether or not the reviewer is recommending the book or not. And yet, in this case, I just wasn’t sure! This lead to both confusion and frustration. This whole quagmire started innocently enough when a friend of mine picked up Secrets of Attacking Chess by the Romanian GM, and said he really liked it. Since I am always looking for new good chess books, I e-mailed Jens “mad-dog” Madsen, our esteemed Editor here at Chessville, and asked him if we had received a copy for review. He said that indeed we had, and he in turn contacted David “the wizard behind the curtain” Surratt, who rushed said copy out to me. And this is when my troubles began. I guess my first problem with the book was that I didn’t feel that it truly delivered what the title promised. That is, I didn’t find ANY secrets to attacking chess. I found lots of deeply annotated games and positions (similar to how Devoretsky will spend several pages on one position), but secrets? No. In fact, the author didn’t attempt to explain any “secrets” anywhere in the book. I am sorry, but you can’t call a book, “Secrets to Attacking Chess,” and then not give any secrets! What the book does contain is a series of chapters that seem independent of one another. As if Marin had written a bunch of chess magazine articles, and then Gambit decided to put them out as a book, under the sexy title “Secrets of Attacking Chess,” simply because they thought that title would sell books, even if it didn’t necessarily fit the material. For example, Marin has one chapter on Paul Morphy (Chapter 5: The Secrets Behind Morphy’s Successes) and compares his style to Anderssen’s. He has another chapter on how blindly following computer analysis can get you into trouble (Chapter 7: A Chess-Player’s Best Friend?!), and then another chapter on the games of Efim Geller (Chapter 1: The Logical course of the Game: The Spark of the Attack), and then another chapter on Korchnoi’s and Tal’s games (Chapter Six: The Paradox of the Century). He also has a chapter called Advantage in Development, but is this really a big secret? Doesn’t just about every chess book ever written on attacking chess have a chapter on a lead in development? And this can also be said for chapter 4, which is titled, Play on Two Wings. And yet, and here is the paradox and the cause of my angst, the material is not bad! Marin is extremely competent and obviously loves the game of chess. He spends a lot of time on key positions and gives you quite a bit of detailed analysis. It’s just that I couldn’t get past the fact that I didn’t feel the material was truly focused on making me a better attacker. It was sort of like Marin enjoyed talking about these games/positions, and by god, that’s what we were going to do, even if in the end it has nothing to do with secrets of attacking chess! The Bottom Line Oh boy. Okay, here it is: I myself didn’t connect with this book. Perhaps it’s just a matter of style, but Marin just doesn’t do it for me. Furthermore, not only did I not find any “attacking secrets,” but I found a lack of continuity from chapter-to-chapter. The book felt more like a collection of good magazine articles then a real treatise on how to attack.
Having said this, I will say that if you like well annotated games by a
thoughtful and highly competent writer, and don’t mind doing some work (some
of the positions have several pages of notes/analysis, and thus makes the
book more appropriate for those over 1800 Elo), and certainly if you like
Marin’s other two books, Learn from the Legends-Chess Champions at their
Best (Quality Chess, 2004) and
Secrets of Chess Defence (Gambit, 2003 - read Jens review of this
book) you will most likely appreciate this latest effort by Marin.
You can
download a sample pdf file from the book, courtesy of Gambit.
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