There are examples divided into six thematic chapters dealing with chessboard geometry, the Sicilian, calculation, endgames, shots and a selection of her very best. The examples are presented with lots of diagrams and words, facilitating reading the book without a board, although it would do no harm to set up the pieces and enjoy some great chess in the format in which it was played.
Polgar was an attacking player par excellence, and many of the examples feature play of ruthless, brutal efficiency. Hertan does a fine job of peeling away the layers of the complexity onion and homing in on the relevant points. The chapter on the Sicilian in itself provides a mini-arsenal of ideas which the reader could file away for dealing with 1… c5.
Likewise, chapter 5, Shots! The moral of this one could well be seek and ye shall find. Of course, all strong players are fearless, but, like her spiritual predecessor Tal, Polgar was adept at handling tension and boldly going where others might hesitate to tread. Her play was not perfect, but by golly it got results.
Bloodlust is all good and well, but nobody hacks their way to world no. All-round skill of a higher order is required, and Judit knew when to swap sledgehammer for scalpel, as the chapter on endgames testifies. There are still plenty of little tactical twists and turns in the simplified positions, but what comes through are her calculating skills and a clarity of play which the author compares to that of Fischer.
Of the older guard, Korchnoi and Spassky suffer in here. Overall a very enjoyable and user-friendly book about a great player. You could use it as a training manual, doing the old cover-the-page-and-figure-out-the-next-move thing, or you could simply work your way through it and enjoy some fantastic chess. Either way something is bound stick for use in your own games. Coaches would also find plenty of excellent material between the covers. Judit, with her sisters, shattered the glass gender ceiling in chess. There can be no better model or inspiration for any girl starting out in the game.
New in Chess This is a nice little book. He sets out to do this by divvying his material into two sections, Strategy and Tactics, each of five roughly equal chapters. Leaving aside the tests and solutions one of each in each section , the topics covered are Weaknesses, Piece Play and Evaluating the position and planning under Strategy , and Calculation, Attack and Defence under Tactics. In the chapter on Calculation, for example, the author concentrates on only five positions, in each of which the reader has to identify sensible candidate moves and pick the strongest.
The play is then thoroughly dissected — with plenty of words — and key points summarised in black boxes. This is an effective way of getting a point across, and I believe the author does it well. Other chapters follow a similar pattern. The Tests and Solutions which I mentioned earlier constitute a large chunk of the book. There are forty strategical test positions and fifty tactical ones. The detailed solutions take up around twenty pages for each section.
It may be a slight book, but it is not lacking in focus or content! Probably not, for a couple of reasons: But, hey, who knows? Overall a very nice book, well produced, which will give enthusiastic youngsters a shove in the right direction and an insight into what is needed to develop their talents to the max, while those of us longer in the tooth can enjoy the play of the new generation and perhaps reflect on what might have been.
French GM Emmanuel Bricard addresses the issue with this work. In two broad sections middlegame and endgame he provides ninety exercises of varying difficulty covering planning, assessments, move selection, finding the win, handling advantages etc. They are detailed, often running to three pages per exercise, and contain lots of words to ensure that the author gets the point across. I was impressed by the clarity of his explanations and the way in which he anticipates potential questions; his aim is clearly to help his readers improve.
Some writers or teachers! The material is drawn from his teaching experience, so he should know where problems of perception lie. Good book, well put together. Good material well explained. Well worth a look. Shereshevsky is the author of two highly-acclaimed books, The Soviet Chess Conveyor and Endgame Strategy, so a new work from him should be a major chess publishing event. Shereshevsky justifies his generous Nunn selections and makes no bones about the Latvian Gambit section: Curiously, the Russian publishers get the pat on the head for this one, not Quality Chess.
You get the idea. It contains an awful lot of previous material plus large extracts lifted from other writers. You have to assume that Shereshevsky sought permission — or is litigation pending? Curious readers want to know! Lakdawala presents model games to show how Andersson tackled and still tackles! He generally reached his favoured systems via 1 Nf3, which explains, for example, why there are no Nimzos in there. Of fireworks there are few; these games represent high class patient, controlled positional play.
Steady build-ups rather than hefty sacs are the order of the day. However, like all great technicians, Andersson knew how to wield a knuckleduster if the occasion warranted it, as not a few of his opponents found out. This is a good defensive idea. Black wants to transfer his bishop to the other wing to help defend his queenside. Comments like these abound. Just a quick example. Tell me what contribution something like this makes to a chess text: Kudos to NiC for the sensible, easy-to-use alphabetical list of players! When I was a kid one of my favourite chess books was called something like Opening Traps.
I had it on almost permanent loan from the library. But it probably did little for my chess. It planted in my head the idea that I would be able to win all my games in about ten moves and that my opponents would all be stupid and overlook stuff. Of course none of this happened. Which is what this one is all about. The miniatures most under twenty moves cover a whole range of tactical motifs and ideas which catch players of all strengths the cast ranges from amateurs to World Champions out all the time — snap mates, pawn grabbing, loose pieces, forks, queens getting trapped — the list is endless.
Some of the mistakes are crass; some are plausible moves of the what-could-possibly-be-wrong-with-that? The notes are a mixture of short, relevant variations and helpful prose. The book is divided into five large chapters according to type of opening, then sections within each chapter based on specific openings, so you can easily start with the openings that interest you. And why not indeed?
Was that a yawn I heard? Boredom is what you make it. The suggested backbone of the Philidor is the Antoshin Variation, 1 e4 d6 2 d4 Nf6 3 Nc3 e5 4 Nf3 exd4 5 Nxd4 Be7, maybe not the sexiest way to defend v 1 e4, but the authors do a good job of covering pretty much everything that White can throw at it, and Black is certainly not without his share of the fun.
There is one potential drawback, though, viz. And that alliteration was unintentional, by the way. There are two ways of looking at the Old Indian: Hear the bishop on f1 giving the c-pawn a mouthful for getting in its way? This is important, since it avoids 2…e5, which can be played after 1 d4 d6 2 c4 e5, and if White goes 3 Nf3, 3…e4, entering a whole new universe. Anyway, whichever view you espouse, the authors show that Black can land plenty of punches of his own in in all the main lines after 5 e4, 5 g3, 5 Bg5 and after an early d4-d5.
This could be a fertile area for anyone looking for a sound yet less well known defence to 1 d4. Talking of sidelines, I decided to check up on what they had to say about those aggressive, less theoretical, lines popular at club level. Sure enough, on p. Not only do they cover the basic stuff, they devote a four-page annotated game to the line! A GM game at that, just to prove that this sort of stuff is floating around up there too. They even provide a game covering the whacky 1 e4 d6 2 d4 Nf6 3 Bc4 move unpunctuated!
By its nature this repertoire concedes early space, so is more suitable for counter-punchers, those with the patience to give their opponents all the rope they need to hang themselves. The point is that Black will always have chances in the complex positions arising, which is what chess is all about. The book is well written not a word wasted , impressively streamlined and features an extensive bibliography. The double-column format is easy to follow. I would like to mention two things, though, one sensible, one contentious. In this case, fourteen of the illustrative games were played by the authors putting their money where their mouths are , and amongst the other black players we find big names such as Carlsen, Rapport, Grischuk and Andreikin.
The diagrams are printed in the conventional White-at-the-bottom manner. To summarise, this is a very good openings book on a range of lines that are not so well known, hence could well provide hefty surprise clout in the hands of those familiar with the material.
He divides his material into five parts —. White surprise lines — and what to play against them III. The Kasparov System IV. Giants of the Tarrasch Defence V. Part one is something of a teaser, and I loved it. In part two the author covers assorted white deviations from the main line. That, of course, is only an opinion, as Bezgodov readily admits, and you can agree or disagree with it all you want.
Part four is self-explanatory, a tribute to the great names who have played the defence, and part five is a collection of ninety-six exercises for solving and analysis. A word about names. The English transliterations Korchnoi and Yusupov are the accepted versions of the names in English. Some strong players write books into which they put very little of themselves to fulfil a contract or in an attempt to make a few bob. You can generally spot them a mile away. They are not writers. Bezgodov is a writer; he has style, and can express himself clearly and succinctly.
You might or might not agree with his choice of material or his opinions, but he can write. A sort of desert island book, in fact. The impression is thus that of a new book, not the rehash of an old one. Chapter seventeen, the rather cheekily entitled What others recommend… and why I disagree , where MI compares and contrasts his selections with those of others who have written on the subject, e.
Negi, Kotronias, gives the reader an idea of his thinking and rationale behind the previous sixteen chapters. What does it do? What it does is attempt to give lines where White has an edge a phrase which crops up again and again and can play the resulting middlegames with confidence. There is much in the material to whet the appetites of positional players as well as cavemen. What does he recommend? Bxf6 work, I saw the positional approach is both safer and stronger. However the author provides lots of explanatory text and a selection of illustrative games for each line to serve as a sort of fast track to getting to grips with the analysis.
The major issue with the suggested lines is, of course, whether you like them or not. And to tell the truth, when I played through some of the lines, I was surprised at how technical many of the resulting positions tended to be. The extensive bibliography includes everything of interest on the Sicilian from recent years. Titled players would find much of interest, and club players who digest even a fraction of the material are going to be well placed to face their next Sicilian.
Production is of the usual NiC high standard: And credit where credit is due for the alphabetical index of players which allows you to locate a game in no time at all. In short, this is a book that 1 e4 players should consider adding to their libraries. It is a fine piece of work, or, as we say in Glaswegian, a stoater. This is a big book in every respect: So who was Gyula Breyer? He was a Hungarian master, active in the early years of the twentieth century until his death in at the appallingly early age of twenty-eight.
Having suffered from a life-long heart condition, Breyer must have known his days were numbered, for, besides his profession as an engineer, he crammed more into his short chess career as player, writer, researcher, journalist, publisher and composer than most players do into a more traditional lifespan. An early death is often a good career move James Dean, Marilyn Monroe , but Breyer would probably be forgotten today were it not for the eponymous variation which he bequeathed to the Ruy Lopez: The work consists of forty-one chapters covering three broad areas: The engrossing biography contains everything you could want to know about Breyer even down to his address.
We meet not only him, but dozens of his contemporaries, well-known and less so, at tournaments and in chess clubs, coffee houses, bars — and casinos! They are a motley collection of characters; it would have been interesting to meet some of them. The photos which pepper the text put faces to names, and contemporary pictures and postcards bring locations alive. Nor is it without its share of excitement. Talking of the First World War, the narrative covers the effects of its political and social aftermath on those who lived through it, including our hero who, not surprisingly, was exempt from military service.
Chesswise, Breyer was what we would now consider a late developer.
He was twenty-one at the time! In these days of twelve-year-old GMs, guys that age are practically washed up. Writers, artists and composers of the past seldom attract such criticism. The good were still good. Dismiss that at your peril. This material would be of interest to anyone interested in biographies and properly formatted might even make a worthwhile book of its own. Biopics have been made about less likely characters.
There are games , the overwhelming majority by Breyer. They are annotated in depth, generally from contemporary sources, by both Breyer himself and many of the leading players of the time. This was in the days when the Classical school still held sway. Nimzo had yet to unleash his Indian, and all the cool stuff that we take for granted nowadays is largely missing, e.
Whatever would they have made of engines and multi-million game databases? The pleasure and value of the games lie in the annotations and how they reflect the spirit of the times. A couple of examples: These were times of great social and political upheaval. It is unavoidable that that spirit would manifest itself in the arts and culture of the time.
Chess was no exception. When he devotes a couple of pages to, say, 3 Bc4 Bc5 there are countless other examples , Breyer does two things: Babies are thrown out with bathwater. It took the genius of an Alekhine to synthesise the best of Hypermodern thought with Classical teaching. Obviously Bent was suss to what had gone before. I doubt if he thought these guys were weak. There are also signs that players of a century ago were ahead of their time 9…Nb8! There will always be room in chess for the free spirit and those who want to go their own way.
The openings and set-ups which became his favourites were based on building up positions with latent power to be released when the time was ripe, rather than dissipation through early activity and exchanges. He modelled himself on Rubinstein, as Boris Gelfand did in his younger years. In his last two tournaments, Berlin virtually an elite tournament of the day and Vienna , he finished first and third respectively in powerful fields. There are lots of essays by Breyer and others e. One incredible example — given in the original Hungarian, for obvious reasons, but with translation — is a whole palindromic text, a phenomenal piece of creativity.
There is a chapter devoted to his compositions, mainly two- and three-movers, but also more esoteric fare, including a retro-problem where it takes moves to reach the diagram position! Given the scope for confusion over people and places in the linguistic and geographical hodgepodge that was the Austro-Hungarian Empire, it was pleasing to see that names are handled well.
Personal names are rightly left alone, e.
And full marks for including accents, e. Too often publishers take the lazy option and ignore them. Place names should be the version familiar to English-speaking readers, e. Issues arising with post-First World War changes are generally made clear, e. That makes more sense to me; the Soviets were in Hungary by that time, not in Production standards are high. A lot of care and attention has gone into this sturdy hardback. Presentation is very easy on the eye; narrative, essays, articles etc. Textual accuracy is very high, although in a book of this size, the odd hiccup will appear.
Must have made playing in each pair difficult! A review can only scratch the surface of a tome like this. You might reasonably ask why, in this day and age, when some juniors have never heard of Tony Miles, you would want to invest forty quid of your disposable income in a book about a virtually forgotten player of a century ago.
Let me turn that round. For the price of a couple of openings books that will probably end up gathering dust on a shelf, you can have a fine hardback which brings to life a bygone era and pays tribute to a great player and remarkable mind. It is an outstanding work. All credit to Jimmy Adams and New in Chess for making it possible. Two from Cyrus Lakdawala: I make these the twenty-seventh and twenty-eighth books in eight years from the prolific Cyrus, one every fifteen weeks. Consider the time needed for research; selection and organisation of material; analysis; checking; drafting and redrafting; editing, proofing etc.
Chess for Hawks looks at style, positional v aggressive chess. His introduction, in which he discusses the differences between hawks and doves, would help players see where their stylistic strengths and weaknesses lie. One thread running through the text is that patience is not the same as passivity. You can still play positional chess and strike indeed have to , as demonstrated, for example, by Petrosian-Lutikov, Tbilisi , pp.
The sources and references for these are sketchy. Not even Alekhine is referenced. A couple of notes caught my eye. Talking of the old masters, Lakdawala joins the list of moderns quick to rubbish those who have gone before. Lakdawala is often succinct and offers good advice, e. However, there is no escaping his incurable logorrhoea. Some examples there are plenty more where these come from:. That was in pole position until p. I guess sometimes this is true. A striking image, simile or metaphor can be an effective teaching tool; verbiage like this destroys the flow of a text.
His editor should give him a nudge. The chess content of First Steps; Fundamental Endings is excellent. The chapters cover all the piece endings and each deals with the features relevant to that ending, e. The book has the deliberate aim of instructing, and, as in Chess for Hawks , when Lakdawala homes in on key points and provides short, crisp explanations he comes across as an effective teacher, e. Two passages in particular are confusing. In his notes to Eliskases-Fischer on p.
Even more confusing is Geller-Fischer on p. Nope, material is level. I checked the game in case the diagram was wrong. I can think of no other explanation. The biggie, though, is the plague of adverbs, the most over-used and least-necessary of words. More often than not, the verb or adjective manages on its own. Well, how else would you say something to yourself? Lakdawala even coins a neologism in the guise of an adverb, and it took me a few shots to read it.
To be fair, not all adverbs are redundant. At least make an effort to get it right! How can that justify its place in the text? His coaching talents are evident in his light touch, gentle humour and knack for imparting useful advice, but there is also much that indicates haste and inattention to detail. The same might be said of some of his writing.
His editor should be helping him out, but, alas, he seems happy to play along. No players, no themes, no material distribution. How a publisher can publish a book like this without an index is beyond me. The sparks flew and the read was engrossing! What have I been writing my own books for all these years, I wondered, if not to instruct as well as entertain? Moreover most chess writers actually wield their pens less to make a fast buck wishful thinking than to improve their own understanding, while at the same time communicating the hard-won fruits of their labour and sense of wonder to a wider audience.
Having dealt at commendably fulsome, yet disciplined length with these and other fundamentals, Dlugy then treats the reader to extended chapters on his games and relationships with a long list of great names, from Smyslov, Spassky and Tal, via the Deep Blue team, to Karpov, Kasparov, Anand, Kramnik and Carlsen. In all of this, Dlugy writes economically and well, with considerable sympathy for the game and all of its adherents.
He explains ideas with a minimum of fuss, using plenty of words and pares down variations to the absolute, necessary minimum. At just over packed pages, the book is a manual in itself that can be studied at length but throughout reads quite delightfully. Oh, and Dlugy is a talented amateur artist, a selection of whose lively, colourful and playful abstracts are reproduced in a 16 glossy page insert in the middle of the book. Three training manuals this time, all from New in Chess, all published in The subtitle is Practical Chess Exercises: Tactics, Strategy, Endgames, so it contains a bit of everything.
There are three parts covering tactics, strategy and endgames. The exercises, particularly the tactical ones, tend to be bright and breezy, a sound teaching device. The sub-sections within each part, e. The games, positions and exercises are held together by a rather gripping narrative which casts lots of interesting insights into the old Soviet way of doing things.
With that in mind, he brings his various strands e. Do you need to be a CM, or aspirant, to benefit from his work? Which bring us neatly back to the subtitle! Even the introduction alone contains lots of good advice! The structure of the book is such that you could work your way through it from start to finish, or dip into it at random. I found myself pausing over examples that caught my interest, and enjoyed them all.
As with the Kalinin book, anyone with a bit of experience looking for good material on middlegame topics would find much of interest in here. I was about to start thumping out this review when I got side-tracked by Anish Giri talking about his game against Lupulescu in the European Team Championship. And I figured that was my review more or less handed to me on a plate. The game Giri is referring to is no. The themes under which the games are sorted are 1.
Attacking the King, 2. Sacrifices and Material Imbalance, 4. Specific Pawn Structures, 6. Sundry Positional Themes and 7. Some rely mainly on verbal explanation while others prefer variations, with varying shades in between. I am less enamoured by a welter of variations no names. As Giddins points out, it is easier to learn something when words are used rather than languageless symbols. A good teacher should be a good explainer.
This is a real potpourri which you could either read your way through or dip into as your interest is piqued. The index of games is the currently favoured NiC list in chronological page order, not a lot of help in finding anything quickly. One more laconic acquaintance simply responded with a Glaswegianism frequently used to indicate perceived inferior quality or nonsense, but since children might well be reading these reviews, discretion dictates that I refrain from quoting it. Talking of indexes, an index of annotators would have been a real asset, as would thinking outside the box an openings index.
Matching up, say, Tiviakov and the Tarrasch French would be well worth while. That strong players like Mr and Mrs G are reading it seems recommendation enough. The selection spans his entire career, from early correspondence efforts to his last-ever tournament game. Quite why Keres never became World Champion has been a rich field for conspiracy theorists, but Franco, rightly in my opinion, concentrates on the chess.
Keres was one of the great classical players, viz. Likewise, especially in his earlier years, he could be a ruthless attacker, and there is plenty of attacking inspiration to be derived from his games. A couple of examples. A gem of measured attacking play. One little thing caught my eye. Game 23 and supplementary Franco passes over this without comment, but the legitimate question is: Browne was in his twenties and amongst the top players in the world at the time; Keres was old enough to be his father.
Obviously he could still play. A mere twelve days later he succumbed to a heart attack. And in the absence of a dedicated question, it does no harm — and will benefit your chess — to pause and ask yourself questions of your own. Hey, tell it like it is! One other slight niggle concerns the openings index. Ruy Lopezes and Sicilians account for about half of the total number of games, so it would have been helpful to have a breakdown by variation.
On the other hand, a tip of the hat. Like me, Keres has a surname that ends with s. When your name ends with s, you get used to people getting into a fankle trying to show that something belongs to you. Basic stylistic guideline is that a proper name ending with s is treated like any other name, viz. Try pronouncing it — ker-ez-es. Not difficult, is it? Perhaps just as well.
Anyway, enough waffle and grammar lessons. This is a good book about a true legend full of great chess, well produced in a translation by Phil Adams so smooth that it reads as though it was written in English. The normal panacea is 3…c6, transposing into a Caro-Kann after 4 d4 cxd5, but that would involve another opening, an option not open to the author, so he suggests 3…e6!
White can now decide whether to get fruity with 4 dxe6, or play it safer with 4 d4, after which 4…exd5 gives what should be a harmless line of the Exchange French. Still, non-critical lines are unlikely to pose an existential threat to Black, so Black should have no qualms about facing moves other than 4 f3. In all three White played 3 Nc3.
Moret devotes one game to this on pp.
IMO, 3 Nc3 deserved more coverage than it gets. Against 1 d4 d5 2 c4, the author recommends the Albin Countergambit, a decent suggestion in keeping with his advocacy of active lines, and with plenty of banana skins for unsuspecting Whites. Moret suggests the Stonewall Dutch. I must confess, my eyebrows shot up when I saw this, after all, the Albin and Stonewall are not exactly from the same mould. Granted, the Stonewall can lead to hefty black attacks, but it can also lead to blocked, manoeuvring positions, so how to reconcile an open, trappy line with a solid, no-nonsense alternative?
Another issue is his coverage of Colle and London systems, particularly popular these days. He addresses these problems with 2…f5, but then only 3 Bg5. The positionally desirable 3 Bf4, clamping down on the hole on e5, gets precisely two!! So now you know. So, praiseworthy though his intentions are, there are gaps which need more plugging. The book pretty much does what it says on the tin, i.
It surveys 3 e5 via illustrative games, with exercises based on another eighty-two. Nearly half of the games are by three players: A work like this, where you want to check the big names at a glance, is just crying out for the traditional alphabetical index. The style is that of the author giving a presentation or lecture.
Depending on the presenter this can run the risk of boredom or info overload, but Sveshnikov is in command of his material and presents it lucidly and at a level sufficient to get his points across without overkill. He is also engagingly frank with his opinions. This helps explain why Keres never won the Big One: Obviously no-one ever told Karpov that. Gotta love that little dusting of self-belief, which surfaces again when he is recommending which players to follow in the Advance. Of course opinions are just opinions, and Sveshnikov is as entitled to his as the rest of us are to ours.
And anyway, why should you care what anyone thinks of your favourite openings? The book is organised in six chapters, as follows:. Chapter 2, the longest, deals with plans and pawn structure. The games almost half of the total are grouped by theme, e. This is an instructive and particularly worthwhile chapter. Too many players get wrapped up in variations. Reading this chapter is like having Sveshnikov sitting at your elbow, going over the games with you. It is virtually a little book within a book. Chapter 5 deals with recent theoretical discoveries.
Chapter 6 is a six-page summary probably good enough to get you up and running while you get to grips with the main body of the book, and written not without a little humour. If you play 1 e4, and another line against the French, it would definitely make you consider adding 3 e5 to your tool box. Recommended to those who defend the French, those who play, or are thinking of playing, the Advance, and to anyone just looking for a lot of interesting chess well explained.
Is he teasing us? Here are some random examples. Decide for yourself which category they best fit. And one about a player-turned-arbiter which made me chuckle, as I thought of Alex and Andy: I think he deserves something better from life. His writing is also confessional. He refers to his bipolarism, and talks openly about the sudden illness which nearly claimed his life at the start of Respect, Andras, for broaching these subjects.
The structure of the book is alternating chapters of text and games of them. The former is readable, engaging and unfailingly interesting; the latter include some wonderful dynamic, creative chess. A huge amount of time has gone into the games and their notes; you could easily and happily lose yourself in them for hours. In the last chapter, Connections , Adorjan pays tribute to the people, famous and not so famous, who have influenced him during his chess life. I found this fascinating and revealing. They range from big names, e.
He recalls many with great affection, e. Rest in Peace, Toni! In other cases you get the impression some dirty linen needs airing. It would have been interesting to know what happened to engender these feelings. There are three things I want to mention in particular. Some of his earlier works were translated from Hungarian, but no translator is accredited in this one, so we can assume he wrote it in English.
A purist might quibble; people who should get out more probably will. Next, the diagrams, which have Black at the bottom. Does that send you into paroxysms of apoplexy? Does it rob you of the power of speech? I have found that diagram orientation can be a touchy subject, up there with road rage and forgetting to take bread out of the freezer.
Is it too much trouble to flip? I know the answer. As Winnie-the-Pooh observed, bouncing down the stairs on his head for the umpteenth time: Kudos to NiC for putting Black at the bottom. The games index is a shambles. Not this one, which is arranged by chapter, first name mainly, see later and page number. To make matters worse, some players are listed by second name only!! By what measure is this efficient? Guys, what are you playing at? This does nothing to enhance your products. Do your readers a favour and stick to the accepted indexing system.
At least the right-hand margin page numbers are aligned correctly in hundreds, tens and units, but the left-hand margin chapter numbers on p. Other publishers are guilty of this too. Talking of indexes, an openings index and an index of themes or topics would have been useful. If you want to track down, say, a particular line in the Sicilian of which there are lots , the only way is to go through every page painstakingly until you find it.
Your attention will not flag. The author hoped that it would be his best book. He could well be right. Therein lies a major issue for would-be exponents: McDonald devotes an introductory chapter to this, dealing with common alternatives 1 d4 Nf6 2 c4 e6 3 g3 d5 and 1 d4 Nf6 2 c4 e6 3 Nf3 d5 4 g3. Perhaps this is assumed knowledge, but in an introductory volume, the distinction is worth making.
Golden rule when working with students: White can also try 1 c4 or 1 Nf3 to avoid certain pesky black lines, e. So the Catalan is not a one-size-fits-all opening. The message is clear: I already feel like my will to live leaving me when he plays the Catalan. OK, having got your Catalan on the board, what can you expect? Black is not short of options. He can take on c4 and play and open type position. He can dig in with …c6 and a more solid set-up. McDonald covers all of these in ten chapters in four large parts:.
The closed centre after 1 d4 d5 2 c4 e6 3 Nf3 Nf6 4 g3. When Black concedes the centre with 4…dxc4. Various lines after 5 Bg2. The main line after 4…Be7 5 Bg2 6 dxc4. This seems to defy common sense. McDonald covers this new idea in depth in chapter six. The material is bang up to date. Thirty-nine of the forty-three games were played in the last five years, seventeen of them from If something needs explained, he explains it.
If something is unclear, he clarifies. It would have been easy to stop after the first or second sentence. Many a writer would have done so. Another which caught my eye relates to a pair of before-and-after diagrams on p. Neil has this one covered too with a line where Black does get …Nd5xf4 in: I wonder how many readers have the will power to stop when they come to one of the grey boxes and put some effort into the question?
I suspect the minority! Even if you lack said will power, you can still derive benefit by mulling over the question and its answer. The wisdom is there. Choose the way that suits you. The other issue is: Well, obviously, otherwise the wording would have been different! The Catalan Move by Move works on a number of levels: One thing missing, rather annoyingly, is a bibliography. In matters Catalan, it would have been nice to know if he had referred to Avrukh. For whom would this one be suitable?
This is one of a new series from Everyman aimed at, as the title suggests, less experienced players looking to pick up the nuts and bolts of an opening. This covered all the mainstream openings in odd pages, a herculean task of compression, with, inevitably, severe limitations on how many pages could be devoted to any specific opening and how much you could actually explain.
What struck me as an untutored youngster, though, was that there were ideas behind the openings. To me you just played sensible hopefully! Let me give you an example which happens to be the last in the book, game 63 , 1 d4 d5 2 c4 Nf6?! After 3 cxd5 Nxd5 4 Nf3 White builds up a big centre, develops easily and gets a ready-made attacking position against the black king. Which is where a book such as this comes in. Most of the illustrative games are of recent vintage, but there are several older games, no bad thing with such a venerable opening.
Each game has plenty of supporting analysis, but what caught my eye — and this is important in a book like this — is the amount of succinct advice dispensed. Back rank mates are less likely. The battery of a white bishop on d3 and queen on c2 is less effective. Small things, but they all add up. If you like an opening and it is playable not completely unsound , then go for it! There is one caveat, though, which players at the lower end of the rating list should be aware of. You can study a book like this all you want, and be ready for whatever White throws at you in your pet QG line, but still be jumped by a pesky London, Colle or Torre, not to mention the good old Blackmar-Diemer Gambit, 2 e4, which tends to score well against inexperienced players whose defensive skills are less than stellar, so be ready for them too!
Having said that, this is a solid and readable introduction to one of the fundamental chess openings. He was also a renowned composer of studies and wrote two of the great chess classics, Modern Ideas in Chess and Masters of the Chess Board, both still well worth reading in these hi-tech digital days. Once he had established an advantage, he was generally lethal in converting it in his own patient manner into a win. There is much to be learnt from such an approach. I like to see this. Some authors assign a degree of papal infallibility to their subjects. One of the strongest early Soviet players, and twice Soviet champion, he was awarded the IM title in , but never made GM.
This might be true enough, but he could surely have mentioned that the Soviets did in fact apply for Romanovsky to receive the GM title, only to withdraw it for political reasons. The answer is very well. There are, however, a few solecisms of the kind which slip through the net all too readily these days, and not only in chess books. The brain expects it. In similar fashion, on p. These sorts of things should be spotted by an editor. Why accept them in a book? Talking of editors, I had trouble finding out who the editor actually was.
There are a number of other things which suggest the editor took his eye off the ball. Several errors creep in when talking about Semmering Semmering is 60 miles to the south of Vienna, and I put it down to a slip despite my comments above by a non-native speaker of English. Shoulda been checked and corrected. On occasion Engqvist is no exception. Talking of clarification, on p. I surmise that it was as a result of upheavals in Central Europe after the First World War, but it would have been nice to know.
That prompts the question: He was born in Bazin in Hungary which, after the break-up of Austro-Hungary, found itself in Czechoslovakia as Pezinok and is now in Slovakia. Just to confuse the issue, he died in Prague and is buried in Vienna in, to add even more confusion, the aforementioned district of Simmering.
Modern antibiotics would have cured the scarlet fever to which he succumbed. Overall a fine effort about a great player, worthy of your attention. The subtitle provides a clue to the contents: A Practical Guide to Inducing Errors. I like to think of it as messing with his mind. Schuyler writes clearly and his book reads easily, his examples — many from his own practice — are to the point, and he takes pains to explain his ideas in words rather than just bare variations.
Lots of pearls of wisdom leap off the page. Why are you playing chess, chum!!? As I said at the start, the book deals with aspects of the game that more casual players might not be fully aware of. Shake off your sloth! Works by or about Capablanca, Alekhine, Euwe, Botvinnik, Smyslov, Keres, Reshevsky and Tal were readily available, often in reprint, a testimony to their enduring popularity.
Writers such as Clarke, Golombek, Alexander and the oft-maligned Fred Reinfeld were excellent chroniclers. The reason was simple. Nobody gets rich writing chess books, and such money as was to be made was more likely to come from the openings manual. Kind of strange, given that Alekhine is one of the most chronicled players of all time. The notes in each volume are detailed, but not so dense that you lose sight of the wood for trees.
Each author uses lots of explanatory prose, one of my hobby horses. It is interesting to compare writing styles. Giddins is probably the chattiest of the three; it is easy to imagine two guys discussing the games. The Tal book is no exception. Franco pretty much gives it to you straight; he discusses the games without too many frills or exuberant wordplay.
Perhaps this is because English is not his native language, and this is how he writes. Or could it be down to translation? Anyway, each book is a solid piece of work and a worthwhile read. Players doubting the value of dipping into the rich heritage of chess could do a lot worse than cast an eye in their direction. Phil also had Tal on toast there too, but the other Big Man wriggled his way out. What a double that would have been. I find it gently ironic that there is an increasing number of theoretical works on lines based on avoiding theory.
Anyway, to our subject matter. Which of these you play depends on how happy you are with them. Practicality is a major consideration throughout, combining workload with lines which will provide reasonable chances. Lakdawala writes in his trademark highly descriptive style, often with the personal touch. When I was starting out, one player was the man of the moment — Boris Spassky.
Spassky, trampling over giants like Keres, Geller and Tal, was the man everybody had their eyes on. Years later, when I got to meet the Great Man at Glenrothes! He wrote little or nothing himself, and has failed to attract the attention of authors in the way that, for example, Tal and Fischer have done. For one of the truly great players of the latter half of the 20 th century, this is remarkable. Thus it is pleasing to see this sturdy effort from the Paraguayan GM. The forty main games are annotated in great depth, but with a pleasing amount of explanatory prose, and many feature supplementary games to illustrate points arising.
If there is a common thread, it is a quest for the initiative. Spassky was never boring unless he was giving or taking short draws in the twilight of his career ; his games were generally full of an energy which we could all benefit from by trying to inject into our own games. Even compared to other top GMs whom he could make look ordinary when he was at his best , he had a remarkable feel for the interplay between time and material. For example, look at his games v Evans Varna and Larsen Belgrade , though it has to be admitted Bent rather asked for it.
And there are plenty of others. Who is the only Scottish player as far as I know! The prolific Cyrus is becoming a true chess Stakhanovite; this is his twenty-second book in the last few years, a prodigious feat. Fischer is probably the player who has had more words devoted to him than any other. Lakdawala starts with an eighteen-page introduction, half of which is devoted to the classic Fischer-Stein game, Sousse Interzonal Oxford English for Careers: Principles, Diagnosis, and Service 4th Edition.
Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists.
They are not writers. Even compared to other top GMs whom he could make look ordinary when he was at his best , he had a remarkable feel for the interplay between time and material. But it is an issue, one that Lakdawala acknowledges. Overall I enjoyed this one. He also frequently enthuses about seafood and fine wine. A couple of examples.
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