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Chessville
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Winning The Won Game Lessons from the Albert Brilliancy Prizes Reviewed by Michael Jeffreys
First, let me say that I have great respect for authors. Having written nine books myself, I know the huge amount of work and dedication that it takes to produce a finished product. Furthermore, when it comes to writing a chess book, which has a very limited market, you are doing it first and foremost because you love the game and feel you have something worthwhile to say about it. The idea that you’re going to make any real money is, unfortunately, not a reality, as most chess authors know all too well.
Indeed, when I would go over my tournament games with my coach, FM Carsten Hansen (back when he was living in Los Angeles), he would look exasperated and say, “What!? You took a draw here?? But you’re clearly winning!” And I would meekly reply, “Well, I knew I was better, but I didn’t know how to increase my advantage.” And then he would instantly rattle off six or seven moves in a row leaving me staring at a position that a 3-year old could win. Ugh. So, would Kopec and Ftacnik’s book finally reveal to me the secrets, tips, and techniques necessary to win won games? Sadly, the answer is no. Although the very title of the book is Winning The Won Game (Lessons from the Albert Brilliancy Prizes), this is completely misleading. In fact, the book DOES NOT show you how to win won games, nor are there really any concrete lessons given. This book, in total, is simply a collection of 64 annotated games that won the brilliancy prize at the U.S. Championship from 1984-2003. Now, the games are all great (hey, they are all brilliancy prize winners, how could they not be!?) and the annotations are perfectly fine, BUT - the authors have failed to deliver on the most important aspect of a book with this title, i.e., teaching me how to win won positions! In other words, the authors don’t stop the game at a key moment, drop a diagram on you, and then break the position down into the correct plans for each side. To my way of thinking, this should then be followed by showing how the winning side successfully carried through this plan, followed by an explanation of what the defender did wrong. Four books from my library come to mind that have successfully used this formula include, From the MiddleGame into the EndGame by Edmar Mednis, Test Your Positional Play by Bellin and Ponzetto, Modern Middlegame Lessons by Evans, Silman and Smith, and the classic, Reassess Your Chess by Silman. All four of these books do a great job of breaking down a position and explaining exactly what each side should be striving for. For example, see how nicely Mednis in From the MiddleGame into the EndGame breaks down the following position:
Is that
sweet, or what!? Now compare Mednis’ gem above with this vague
description from page 86 of Winning the
Won Game, after White’s 18th move in the game Wolff-Fedorowicz,
US Championship, 1993 (note that, inexplicably, Kopec and Ftacnik give
“Bloomington, IL” as the location when in fact this game was played in Long
Beach, CA):
Needless to say, it is beyond me how reading the above will help me at all win the diagramed position. However, things are not entirely bleak. Now that I have told you what I don’t like about the book, let’s take a look at a few of the things I do like. First, the look and feel of the book. Instead of a glossy cover, it is a mat finish that simply feels nice to the touch. The cover art consists of a silhouette of a large black and white Staunton chess set against a lime green background. Simple, yet elegant. The layout is double column with an average of two diagrams per page. And at $19.95, you get 208 pages of chess, a much better bargain than some of these opening books that are now going for as much as $26.00 per book. Secondly, the book has something that all chess books should have, but many don’t: an index of games. Here it’s on the last page of the book, and thus makes it easy to find a particular game. Thirdly, the material at the front of the book before you actually get into the games is quite extensive. After a full page of acknowledgements, there is a foreword by Paul M. Albert, Jr., the gentleman responsible for putting up the money for the brilliancy prizes each year. He talks about how he learned chess growing up (before the Fischer boom), but stayed away for 40 years as he built up his investment banking career. However, he came back to chess and happened to work on a business project with IM James Sherwin (who played Fischer). Sherwin invited him to become a trustee of the American Chess Foundation and this is when Albert decided to give away a monetary prize (although he doesn’t say how much) each year (some years there were two and three winners) to the “best” game (s). Since he admittedly wasn’t strong enough to choose the winners himself, he wisely had GM Arthur Bisguier make the selections. In the next section, IM Kopec tries to explain just what makes a game “brilliant.” However, his rambling discourse is a bit confusing. First, he says:
Yet, in the very next paragraph, Kopec says:
Well, which is it? Must the game be executed with correctness all the way throughout (as Kopec suggests in the first paragraph, or is it enough to simply display “sequences or episodes” of correctness, as the latter paragraph suggests? To further add to the confusion, Kopec has four pages of charts where he attempts to rank all the games, laid out in tiny 4 pt. type, that is very difficult to read and crammed with loads of information and statistics, most of which are banal at best. The confusion becomes even worse after Kopec writes:
Say what!? If it’s a top 10 list, where do you get 11 choices from?? Finally sending the entire section over the cliff is when Kopec attempts to explain why he and Ftacnik disagree on almost 50% of their rankings of the top 11 (10?) games. The fact that the two of them can’t even agree as to which games are “the best of the best” just adds to the muddleness, and I found myself wondering, “Who cares if Seirawan-Lapshun is #5 or #3, if it’s a great game that’s all that matters. However, all is not lost as the succeeding five pages are extremely useful, as this section nicely lists all the winners of the prizes, along with the year the game was played, the opening, and the two combatant’s names. The Bottom Line When I go into the store and buy a bag that says “Oreos” on it, I expect to find Oreo cookies inside of it. If I were to open it up and find Pringle’s potato chips inside, I am going to feel duped. Well, that’s the case here. The authors (publisher?) have mislabeled their product. If you are looking for an excellent games collection which features the very best efforts from such U.S. stars as Seirawan, Peters, De Firmian, Shirazi, Christiansen, Alburt, Benjamin, Rhode and others, over the past 30 years, than you will certainly enjoy this book.
However,
if your goal is to learn how to win won games, I would suggest you pass on
this book and pick up one of the other four books I mentioned above, as they
truly deliver the goods.
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