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BCM Chess Book Reviews : February 2003Return to the BCM Review Index
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This book tells the tale of Fischer the man rather than Fischer the chess player. The foreword makes it clear that it does not cover the activities of the modern-day, post-chess Fischer; this is probably because no one has been able to find out much, other than his penchant for phoning up radio stations to air various outrageous opinions and grievances. The first half of the book is Gufeld’s anecdote-packed narration of Fischer’s chess life (first published in Russian as Fischer: Legends and The Truth) with lots of first-hand descriptions from his contemporaries and rivals, photographs and lightly-annotated scores of ‘Fischer’s Greatest Hits’. It is very gossipy, although we have been regaled with many of the stories before and one has a strong suspicion that many of Fischer’s juiciest quotes were made up by journalists (small wonder he reserves a special hatred for the practitioners of that profession). The second half of the book consists of six articles of variable quality by co-authors Carlos Almarza-Mato, Mike Morris, Wolfgang Unzicker, Gudmundur Thorarinsson, Grabi Kristjánsson and Thinkers’ Press editor-in-chief Bob Long, with tales of their first-hand contact with the great man, plus some general commentary on his chess style. Hardly the definitive work on the subject but pleasantly readable.
This book, like others in the series, is intended to give the intermediate junior or club player the basic ideas of the opening so that they can either play it or know enough to meet it. It is a particularly tough task for a chess author to describe the fundamentals of this defence because it is so diverse (the main lines with 3 Nd2, 3 Nc3 and 3 e5 all lead off in very different directions) and imbalanced. It is not really a beginner’s opening. Jacobs is clearly aware of this, and has a hard time trying to keep it simple. 81 top-level grandmaster games are analysed in some depth and the resultant work is one which will probably suit slightly more experienced players who are interested in switching systems.
The fourth of five volumes devoted to Kramnik’s White repertoire.
Confusingly it is also the last as volume five was published out of sequence
some time ago and reviewed
in the December 2002 BCM. This volume covers games starting 1 Nf3
d5 2 d4 without 2...Nf6 or 2...e6, and concentrating on 2...c5, 2...Bg4,
2...Bf5 and 2...Nc6 (Chigorin Defence), plus the Queen’s Gambit Accepted,
the Slav and the Semi-Slav variations. As always Khalifman is an assiduous
and knowledgeable author, and this volume completes one of the best series
of works on the opening for a number of years.
These three volumes contain the games of all the world championship matches played between 1886 and 1998 (with both ‘official FIDE’ and ‘rebel Kasparov’ matches included). Volume One covers the matches up to 1937, Volume Two from 1948 to 1972, and Volume Three 1978 to 1998. The games are annotated Informator-fashion. Many of the annotations have a remarkable similarity to those found in the games database supplied with other commercially-available databases. Each of the matches is given a very brief introduction in four languages (English, German, Russian and Spanish). The prefaces of the three volumes are penned by Ilyumzhinov, Smyslov and Karpov. Ilyumzhinov’s preface to the first volume reads like an obituary for the match-play championship system, with “lack of commercial appeal and difficulty in providing a worthy remuneration” being cited as its drawbacks. In Volume Three Karpov says that “the chess world is witnessing the birth of a new system for conducting the world championship, in which it would seem that the element of luck will play a significant role.” The book covers look like an explosion in a paint factory. Buy all three volumes together for £46.99!
This is the autobiography of Hungarian woman grandmaster Maria Ivanka
and, like the Kosteniuk book How I Became a Grandmaster at 14,
it is chock-full of stories, pictures, anecdotes as well as chess. This
is akin to printing your family scrap-book and photo album and sharing
it with the world. The title derives from the Hungarian women’s team
and their regular habit of taking the silver medals at the Olympiad (behind
Georgia). Also like Kosteniuk, Ivanka was something of a pin-up some decades
ago, as attested by many of the earlier photos. The book was written to
celebrate her half-century and contains some revelations about the organisation
of Hungarian chess in the 1960s and 1970s. Ivanka shows that success came
in spite of the national federation’s efforts (often rather murky)
rather than because of them.
The book contains 116 games played by Belgian master Edgard Colle (1897-1932)
and in which he either played the Colle System (d4, Nf6, Nbd2, c3 and
Bd3 for White) or in which his opponents attempted to avoid this line
of play. The author has collated them in such a way as to allow the reader
to treat the book as an opening manual. There are 15 pages of biography
and career statistics on Colle, and the game annotations are mainly culled
from contemporary accounts and more recent books on this opening. This
is a thorough and well-researched book which will be of interest to historians
as well as Colle System players.
This is another valuable piece of research into American chess history
by the indefatigable John Hilbert. The book describes the 3rd USA championship
tournament, won by Reshevsky who thereby completed a hat-trick of the
first three titles. Hilbert provides rare insight into the players and
their games. This reviewer was struck by the impact of world events and
the difficult economic environment on the players: Kashdan, known as “The
Little Capablanca”, was reduced to selling insurance, and the greatly
gifted Reuben Fine eventually gave up the professional game to practice
psychiatry. Reshevsky alone remained in the top echelon of the game after
the war.
But saddest of all is the section on the exhibition match between Lasker,
and Marshall. Lasker, impoverished and terminally ill, was only able to
play two games. It is remarkable that these two first played in Paris
1900 and met for the last time in 1940. During those years Marshall won
only two games – the first they played and one in this mini-match
– despite many tournaments and a World Championship match in between.
Review by Ray Edwards.
The latest yearbook has all the usual features: NIC Forum; Sosonko’s Corner; book reviews, with Glenn Flear discussing the latest books and videos, by Yakovich, Emms, Aagaard, Pinski and Andrew Martin; and 36 opening surveys including Sicilian, Moscow Variation 3 Bb5, by Boersma; Sicilian, Dragon Variation, by Golubev; Sicilian, Scheveningen Variation, by Karolyi; and the Sicilian, Sveshnikov Variation 10...Bg7, by Rogozenko.
This volume of the reprints of Casson and Helms’ estimable monthly
covers the Manhattan CC international, the New York State Championship,
and other international events such as Hastings, Southsea and some important
FIDE meetings of that year.
This series of opening books is clumsily entitled “Teach Yourself In Chess Openings”. This book is laid out in Informator fashion with 401 French defence games sorted into variations with short introductory texts in English, German, Russian and Spanish. Games are annotated with Informator symbols and up to date to early 2001. After the games there are 50 test positions for the reader to solve, all deriving from typical French Defence positions.
The same format and principle as the French Defence book by the same author (see above).This one contains 448 games (plus a handful from Wijk aan Zee 2001 added at the end) and 50 test positions.
The latest biographical CD-ROM from ChessBase charts the meteoric career of Mikhail Tal. Johannes Sondermann is responsible for the biographical part of the CD. During his research, he also interviewed Tal’s widow and reveals a lot about the “private” Tal. There is a collection of all Tal’s 2,857 games; the biography (with texts and pictures); an extensive video interview with Tal’s widow; additional historic videos; plus a training database with 250 Tal combinations for the reader to test his mettle. No need to own any other software; the CD-ROM comes with a built-in copy of the necessary software.
