The Chess Mind

Saturday, October 17, 2009

New Books from Russell Chess Enterprises

I just got a batch of review copies from Russell Enterprises; three of which I expected and looked forward to and three I had no idea about. Let's start with the good stuff:

(1) Karsten Müller, Bobby Fischer: The Career and Complete Games of the American World Chess Champion. Coming in at just over 400 pages, this book puts the good old collection by Wade and O'Connell and the far less good collection by Hays out of business...almost. Müller annotates every game, and while that's occasionally fulfilled to the letter rather than the spirit, trivial commentary is the exception. The overwhelming percentage of the games have at least a few useful comments and some have substantial analysis.

The book has some additional features: many photos (a large number of which I hadn't seen before), crosstables, a foreword by Larry Evans (comprising a series of vignettes from Fischer's life), an extensive introduction by Müller and an opening survey by Andy Soltis. Müller also offers a few narrative remarks when introducing each event; finally, the book rounds off with a summary of Fischer's career results and highlights, together with openings and opponent indexes. The only omission that bothered me was the failure to include his blitz games from Herceg-Novi in 1970 and the Manhattan Chess Club in 1971. (Oddly, at least if the rationale for not including games from those events is that they were blitz, he does gives the Evans Gambit Fischer-Fine blitz game Fischer presents in My 60 Memorable Games (MSMG).)

The book doesn't substitute for best-game works like Fischer's own MSMG or, say, Soltis's Bobby Fischer Rediscovered, nor does it cover Fischer's simuls (as John Donaldson has in a couple of books). But as a one-volume compilation of all his official match and tournament games, it's the best book out there by far. Unless you have a principled objection to buying a book on Fischer because of his crazy (or worse) political/ethnic views, I'd highly recommend its purchase.

(2) Mark Dvoretsky and Oleg Pervakov, Studies for Practical Players: Improving Calculation and Resourcefulness in the Endgame. Most of you probably know of Dvoretsky, who has achieved much fame in the chess world as a trainer and an author, but who, you might wonder, is Pervakov? The answer is that he is one of the great study composers of our time, and together they have written a book valuable for those who want to train and for those who love beauty in chess.

The book is just what it purports to be, but except for a chapter on Wotawa's studies it's not a series of "White to play and ----" diagrams followed by pages of solutions. You will find text aplenty, offering explanations, a discussion of themes, aesthetics, applications to and analogies with over the board play, and more besides. A further interesting feature is the final, 47-page chapter, which presents studies not by the professionals of composition but by practical players (most of the world champions, and a number of top-class grandmasters from Tarrasch to Morozevich). This book too I can highly recommend, and have already been working with the original, Russian-language edition for some time.

(3) Hikaru Nakamura and Bruce Harper, Bullet Chess: One Minute to Mate. The book won't make you as strong as Nakamura, but it can help you think like a bullet player. Nakamura and Harper emphasize that bullet chess is not "real" chess, and in most of the book's 20 chapters (Nakamura observers will know that it's one of his favorite numbers!) they present and illustrate bullet chess concepts.

For example, there are chapters on time (they don't try to quantify what it's worth in terms of material counts, but have some useful things to say about it), pre-moving (when to use it, when not to, and how and when one should sometimes use the opponent's pre-moving against him), simplification (this needs to be evaluated with an eye on time) and bullet endings (again, these need to be evaluated with the clock in mind).

It's not a bad book for bullet fans. One initially surprising aspect is that Nakamura included comparatively few of his own games and fragments. That's sensible when one remembers that he's writing a book for the amateur's benefit and not a sort of autobiography of his bullet career. However, having seen him perform in bullet (and blitz), I, and probably many others, would have enjoyed a separate chapter offering some of his "greatest hits". So if you're looking for Nakamura's Best One-Minute Games, you've come to the wrong place; if you're looking for a book that will help you think about playing better bullet chess (not "real" chess!), then buy the book!

(4-6) Those are the books I knew about and anticipated. The package also came with a three-part series called Teaching Chess Step by Step, by Igor Khmelnitsky, Michael Khodarkovsky and Michael Zadorozny. The series is designed to help teachers working with elementary school students, and is made up of a teacher's manual (book 1), an exercise book (book 2) and an activities book (book 3). My impression is that while they might be useful for teachers who know very little about chess, those who know more - like the readers of this blog - will benefit much more from a content-rich book like Gary's Adventures in Chess Country (which I reviewed here). But I must reiterate what I wrote in that review: I'm no expert in the beginner-book genre, much less in the sub-genre intended for young children.

In sum, I recommend the Müller and Dvoretsky & Pervakov books to all my readers, the Nakamura & Harper book to bullet fans, and the teaching books only to elementary school teachers with basically no knowledge of the game (but with the admission that my experience of introducing the game to elementary school kids is very limited).

Posted by Dennis Monokroussos on Saturday October 17, 2009 at 2:50pm. 4 Comments 0 Trackbacks

Thursday, August 20, 2009

Book Notice: Victor Bologan's The King's Indian: A Complete Black Repertoire

Victor Bologan, The King's Indian: A Complete Black Repertoire (Chess Stars 2009). 356 pp. Reviewed by Dennis Monokroussos.

I don't have time to write a proper review, but Victor Bologan's new book on the King's Indian deserves a quick mention while it's still very much hot off the press. Bologan, an elite GM, has written two previous books (at least in English) that have been highly acclaimed (his autobiographical Victor Bologan: Selected Games 1985-2004 and The Chebanenko Slav According to Bologan) - and I would join the chorus on them - and this book looks promising as well.

Here are the book's obvious pluses: it's written by a very strong GM (2689 FIDE, at last count), it's up-to-date, it's thorough and while there are game scores a-plenty there's a good deal of independent analysis as well. There are many small-scale explanations, which is useful but presupposes a certain degree of sophistication (this isn't a primer for beginners); still, even average club players can learn something more than series of moves for memorization.

As I noted, the book is thorough - perhaps more so than necessary. Bologan often presents multiple lines for Black, including on occasion some he thinks are distinctly inferior to other choices. While this may be unnecessary, strictly speaking, it provides a broader understanding of the variations and the problems each player is trying to solve, and as such it improves the reader's chess culture.

The bottom line is that if you're a King's Indian player, you're probably nuts not to buy it. That said, there are some flaws in the book. As is often the case with Chess Stars volumes, the translation is leaden.Generally speaking, that’s fine by me – I’m not buying opening books to read Shakespeare. (And who would? “Two-b or not two-b, that is the question: whether to fianchetto my queen’s bishop or not.” Or “Behold, thy bishop has come under attack; verily, get thee to a monastery – hie!” It would take a huge amount of space to get through a single game – almost as many pages as Hübner would take to cover a single move in a position he finds interesting.) It’s a very nice tradeoff: high quality books by non-native English speakers, brought to press in a hurry, in exchange for mediocre prose in translation; I’ll take it every time.

However, there were more problems this time than I can recall in any previous Chess Stars volume, and they weren’t always minor matters of grammar or eloquence. For instance, on p. 321, covering the position after 1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 g6 3.Nf3 Bg7 4.g3 d6 5.Bg2 d6 6.0-0 Nc6 7.Nc3 a6 8.d5 Na5 9.b3 c5 (Bologan also covers 9…Rb8) 10.dxc6, Bologan’s main line is 10…bxc6, but here’s what he says about the other capture:

“It is obvious that Black cannot equalize with 10…Nxc6 11.Bb2 Qa5 12.Nd5 (12.Qc1 Bf5 13.Rd1 Rac8 14.Nd5 Nxd5 15.Bxg7 Kxg7 16.Rxd5 Qc7 17.c5 Rfd8 18.cxd5 Rxd6= Ilincic – Kislik, Budapest 2008) 12…Nxd5 13.Bxg7 Nc3! (Black avoids cxd5, thanks to this intermediate move and he should equalize gradually.) 14.Bxc3 Qxc3 15.Rc1 Qa5 16.Qd2 Qxd2 17.Nxd2 Nd4 18.Rfe1 Rb8 19.c5 dxc5 20.Rxc5 Rd8 21.e3 Ne6 22.Rc2 b5 23.b4 Bb7= Dobosz – Lanka, Austria 2009.”

This does not compute! Does he mean to say that it’s obvious that Black _can_ equalize with 10…Nxc6? It doesn’t seem so: he thinks 10…bxc6 is only good for equality as well, but should be preferred; further, even if it does equalize, it clearly takes Black some work (“…and he should equalize gradually”). Does he mean instead to say that Black cannot _easily_ equalize with 10…Nxc6? Or did he leave out some superior option for White? Who knows?

It is an annoyance, and I found many more errors without having to look very hard for them. Generally speaking, it wasn't too tough to figure out what was meant or what was missing, so this is no recommendation to avoid the book. It is a plea, perhaps, for more careful translation and possibly copy-editing - maybe a native English speaker should be involved with the final product.

So, while I have only skimmed the text and checked a few variations of interest, what I have seen so far is encouraging, and consistent with what I've come to expect from Bologan's early work. To recap my earlier comment, then, King's Indian players would be a bit crazy not to buy this book. How often are you going to find a player of Bologan's caliber writing about your pet opening?

Posted by Dennis Monokroussos on Thursday August 20, 2009 at 1:53am. 0 Comments 0 Trackbacks

Wednesday, August 19, 2009

A Short Review of Simon Williams' The New Sicilian Dragon

Simon Williams, The New Sicilian Dragon. Everyman Chess, 2009. Reviewed by Dennis Monokroussos.

Maybe it’s something in the water in Great Britain, but those guys publish material on openings faster than politicians make promises and tell lies. Between Everyman, Gambit, ChessPublishing.com, Batsford and Quality Chess, British opening analysis is being delivered to a public with seemingly infinite discretionary income so fast they’re going to have to invent new openings to keep them from getting a day off. (I sometimes wonder whether “Richard Palliser” is an actual person or the name of a secret group, like “Bourbaki” in mathematics. If it is an actual person, I hope they at least give him bathroom breaks. He is so prolific there might be a market for “Richard Palliser facts” over at Everyman, akin to those invented for Chuck Norris. But I digress...)

The book under consideration in this review is Simon Williams’ The New Sicilian Dragon, which claims to be the first book (at least in English) primarily devoted to the “Dragadorf” Sicilian. In case you’re not sure about the variation I’m referring to, it generally arises like this: 1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 d6 3.d4 cxd4 4.Nxd4 Nf6 5.Nc3 g6 6.Be3 and now 6…a6, creating a sort of Dragon/Najdorf hybrid. (Thus “Dragadorf”; but because it’s more Dragonlike than Najdorfish, “Dragondorf” seems more appropriate – plus it sounds better.) This variation is not new: Botvinnik played it a couple of times (this I knew) and so did Alekhine (this I didn’t). Despite this pedigree, the variation has only recently captured a broader audience. Many grandmasters have tried it, including such Dragon specialists as Chris Ward, Sergey Kudrin and Mikhail Golubev, and in the upper reaches of the atmosphere Ivan Cheparinov and Alexander Khalifman can be counted among its (occasional) adherents. It isn’t hugely popular yet, but that’s in part due to its lack of publicity and somewhat amorphous nature; this book takes a step towards fixing both impediments.

Simon Williams is a British Grandmaster who started playing the Dragadorf in 2004, so this is not publishing for its own sake; he has put his money where his mouth is, and knows whereof he speaks. His results with it against his peers have been respectable, and when he plays down, he is more than capable of showing the line in its glory. Here’s a game from this past July, played too recently for his book:

T. Heinatz (2294) – S. Williams (2527), Swiss Championship 2009:
1. e4 c5 2. Nf3 d6 3. d4 cxd4 4. Nxd4 Nf6 5. Nc3 g6 6. Be3 a6 7. f3 Nbd7 8. Qd2 Bg7 9. O-O-O b5 10. Kb1 Bb7 11. Bh6 Bxh6 12. Qxh6 Rc8 13. Bd3 Rxc3 14. bxc3 Qc7 15. Ne2 Nb6 16. g4 Qc5 17. Ka1 Na4 18. Qd2 Nd7 19. Rb1 Ne5 20. Rhf1 O-O 21. h4 d5 22. h5 dxe4 23. fxe4 Nxg4 24. hxg6 hxg6 25. c4 Qe5+ 26. c3 Rd8 0-1

About this game, it can be said that if Heinatz had and examined Williams’ book, he would not have lost like this! (For starters, Williams argues that Kb1 in this particular variation is often a waste of time.) Interestingly, though, Williams mentions 15…d5!? and 15…Nc5 16.g4 Na4 in his notes to the game J. Ibarra Jerez – M. Vasiliev, Salamanca 2005 (game 20 in the book, in which Black chose 13…e5 instead) but not the move he actually played. This doesn’t strike me as any sort of secretiveness on his part, though, as both 15…Nc5 and 15…Nb6 are nearly equivalent – the main point of both moves is to route the knight to a4.

The book has quite a lot going for it, not least because it currently has the field all to itself. The games seem well-chosen, and Williams does a good job of laying out the main plans and presenting a full repertoire. Let’s start with a look at the contents:

In chapter 1, he covers the position after 6.Be3 Bg7 7.f3 a6 8.Qd2 Nbd7 9.Bc4, calling this the critical test of the Dragadorf at the time of his writing. He notes that Black can choose between four different plans: (1) Active counterplay based on the …Rxc3 sacrifice; (2) striking out with …e5 and …b4; (3) an early …Nc5 and …Nxb3, often combined with 0-0-0; (4) Black plays an early …h6.

In chapters 2 and 3, White varies with 9.0-0-0, and just as in the main line Dragon Black’s counterplay is often based on …d5. In chapter 2 White goes for a quick g4-g5 (with the h-pawn often following along), while in chapter 3 White continues with 10.Bh6 (after 9…b5) before shoving the kingside pawns. Against this latter idea, Williams notes two different approaches: ones with …Rxc3 and those with …b4.

In chapter 4 we see the “positional approach”. Instead of 9.Bc4 or 9.0-0-0, White tries 9.g4 b5 10.g5 Nh5 11.a4. It’s a little unusual at first to think of g4-g5 as “positional”, but White is trying to misplace Black’s pieces rather than blow him off the board with an attack. Williams also examines the early deviations 10.Nc6 and 9.Nd5.

In chapter 5 we find the Accelerated Dragadorf with 6…a6. The pluses are that it saves a tempo if White plays the Qd2 + Bh6 plan, while the earlier …b5 makes it harder for White to play Bc4. On the other hand, pushing the b-pawn before White commits to castling long makes the a4 rejoinder positionally dangerous for Black. Naturally, Williams focuses his attention on this last possibility.

Chapter 6 takes a step back toward “normal” Dragon lines in reply to White approaches like 6.Bc4 or 6.Be3 + 7.Be2. Even here, though, it’s is possible for Black to Dragadorf his opponent, as Short did against Glek (successfully) and Anand (unsuccessfully) back in the mid-to-late 90s.

Finally, chapter 7 leaves the Dragadorf behind and examines other non-6.Be3 tries like 6.g3, 6.f4 and 6.Bg5. Once you’ve reached the Dragon on move 5, Williams has you covered.
I like the structure of the book and much else besides, and those who play this or are interested in playing it should at least consider picking it up. The book includes games through 2008, but as this isn’t yet the world’s most topical line there’s still time to catch up and supplement the material.

So far, so good. I was playing through the games in the e-book, without an engine running, just trying to pick up the general ideas, and then something caught my eye. In game 12, M. Perez Candelario-I. Cheparinov, Dos Hermanas 2005, he presents a variation (starting with 22.Rd7! instead of the game’s 22.Qxg3?) and concludes it with this comment: “White's attacking chances look very good. Indeed, it's quite possible that White is just winning.” The statement provoked my curiosity, so I switched on Rybka, which instantly gives White a nearly four pawn advantage (which doesn’t decrease as the engine continues to run). That left me wondering if his comment was British drollery, or if instead Williams’ use of the computer was at best sporadic. One should not use the computer to analyze when one is training, but definitely should when creating an opening book! Likewise, later in the game, when examining 45…Qd5 (instead of Cheparinov’s 45…bxc4??) he considers 46.Qd2 and 46.Qe3, but for Rybka 3 46.Qb4+ is always its main move. While these points are no theoretical significance whatsoever, I started to wonder if they were indicative of a relative lack of computer use in checking his analysis. That might well be very serious in the context of the sharp lines in the opening.

So, from here on out I decided to let the engine run while I went through the rest of the games, to see how his judgments squared with the silicon monster’s in the opening. In the next game, he offered an improvement for Black which was quite sensible – no problem there – but within that variation clear improvements were available to both players. Later in the game (post-theory), he offers an improvement for Black, but suggests it’s still going to see tough times after White’s rejoinder. Unfortunately, the move he suggests for White is a blunder, allowing Black to draw. (His basic assessment was correct, however, and with other moves White can keep a significant advantage.)

In game 14 (Swinkels-Chatalbashev), however, he explicitly refers to a possible White improvement as “the computer’s suggestion” – a relief! Ironically, there are several moments in the subsequent analysis of the computer’s suggestion where Williams’ analysis differs fairly significantly from Rybka’s. Later in the game, on move 19, he considers one Black option dubious, concluding at the end of the variation that “Black has a problem with his king.” This is indeed the case by the end of the line – White is winning – but only because the last move given for Black is a blunder. After a better move (21…c3 rather than 21…e6, in case anyone is curious), Black is better, perhaps considerably so.

In game 15, the analysis looked more reliable. There were some moments where he slightly disagreed with the computer, but it was clear that he had taken it into account and I tended to agree with his assessments. There were a few moments where I disagreed, but perhaps these were more human disagreements than anything else. Game 16, there was one moment where I think he misevaluated the position, but generally it was clear that he consulted with the oracle.

I went through a few more games, but rather than report all my results, I’ll leave you with a simple caveat emptor. We all err, and the computer’s outputs aren’t infallible either. Even so, there were more gaps than I would have liked to see, but overall I think the book has much more good than bad. Just make sure you check his suggestions with your engines before you trot them out in tournament play!

Posted by Dennis Monokroussos on Wednesday August 19, 2009 at 5:20pm. 4 Comments 0 Trackbacks

Monday, August 17, 2009

A Short Review of Semko Semkov's Kill KID 1

Semko Semkov, Kill KID 1 (Chess Stars 2009), 140 pp. £16.99 Reviewed by Dennis Monokroussos.

Kill KID, vol. 1 (not to be confused with a certain two-part movie or advocacy of violence against children or goats), is the first of what might (or might not) be a series of volumes yet to come. The concept is that this book, and any potential successors, will be dedicated to providing an anti-King’s Indian Defense (that’s the KID to kill) repertoire. Semko Semkov, who is also one of the powers-that-be behind Chess Stars publishing, is a Bulgarian IM (with two GM norms to his credit, but inactive for many years now) who has put together a repertoire for White based on the Four Pawns Attack (FPA). He is not the first to do so – GM Anatoli Vaisser wrote a well-acclaimed book promoting the FPA in the late 90s – but it has been long enough that another volume on the topic is to be welcomed.

As those familiar with the FPA know, it is a usable weapon against both the KID and the Modern Benoni – the lines often transpose – and the book’s first section, divided into two parts*, examines the positions that result after 1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 g6 3.Nc3 Bg7 4.e4 d6 5.f4 c5 6.d5 0-0 7.Nf3 e6 8.Be2 exd5 9.cxd5. Part 1 covers lines without 9…Re8 (especially 9…b5?!, 9…Nbd7, and 9…Bg4), while part 2 covers the main line with 9…Re8.

Concerning 9...Bg4, he spends about 30 investigating 10.0-0 Nbd7 11.h3 Bxf3 12.Bxf3 and now not the typical ideas involving Re1 and/or a4, but plans with the very direct g4. As for 9...Re8, I think it is this chapter that offers the book’s most significant contribution: after 10.e5 dxe5 11.fxe5 Ng4, the main line used to be 12.Bg5, but 12…Qb6 has been doing fine for Black. Instead, Semkov advocates 12.e6 fxe6 13.d6, about which he writes “[T]his variation has been played before, but I link it with ideas that aim for sound positional compensation instead of depending on long, forcing variations. You will find about 30 pages of original analysis as well as a critical survey of the current theory.” (Introduction, page 7.)

Parts 3 and 4 are in the section “King’s Indian Defence and Volga Pawn Structures”. Here we have variations where Black plays …c5 but omits 7…e6 with the inevitable capture on d5, and variations where Black does without …c5 altogether or at least for the immediate future. (A significant example is 5…0-0 6.Nf3 Na6 7.Bd3 e5.)

Finally, the third section looks at various early Black diversions like 1.d4 g6 2.e4 Bg7 3.c4 d6 4.Nc3 and now 4….e5, 4…Nbd7 and 4…Nc6 receive investigation. There’s also a look at 1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 d6 3.Nc3 and now 3…Bf5, 3…e5 and 3…c6 are examined. Semkov does not discuss 1.d4 d6, however, as he believes that the best response is 2.e4, transposing to a Pirc, and for that the reader is (understandably) directed to another Chess Stars volume – the Khalifman book An Opening for White According to Anand, volume 4.

Now a word about the organization of the parts (chapters). As with the “____est Sicilian” books**, there is a tripartite structure. First comes the “Quick Repertoire”, in which the main lines are presented in a useful summary fashion. This is helpful for those starting to find their way, as well as to those looking for a quick review of the material. Next comes the theoretical meat in the “Step by Step” section, where all the details are filled in. Finally, there comes the self-explanatory “Complete Games”. Theory is not rehashed here, but illustrated with thematic games.

Now you know what is covered and how the material is presented. Is the book worth your while? I think it is, if you play the King’s Indian or if you’re an aggressive 1.d4 player willing to play a variation as committal as the FPA. Much of the material is original, and so you won’t easily be able to reproduce it in a couple of minutes with Rybka, nor will you find any handy refutations in books like Golubev’s 2006 Understanding the King’s Indian or even Bologan’s brand-new The King’s Indian: A Complete Black Repertoire. (I checked both books to make sure!) At the end of the day, I’m sure Black will be fine against the FPA, but if this variation suits your mood it can be an excellent practical weapon, especially at the club level, and so I can recommend the book to its target audience.

* It’s a little strange to at least American readers to see “part” used for “chapter”. Of course it’s not confusing when you’re reading the book, but it does need to be kept in mind when reading the review. I would prefer to label the three main sections of the books “parts” and use “chapter” for what they call “parts”.

** There's The Sharpest Sicilian, The Easiest Sicilian and The Safest Sicilian.

Posted by Dennis Monokroussos on Monday August 17, 2009 at 2:23am. 0 Comments 0 Trackbacks

Friday, June 5, 2009

Book Notice: 1.b4 by Konikowski & Soszynski

If you're interested in the Sokolsky/Orangutan/Polish (1.b4) and like books with encyclopedia-style coverage, the new Russell Enterprises offering 1.b4: Theory & Practice of the Sokolsky Opening by FM Jerzy Konikowski and Marek Soszynski is the thing for you. I recall many reviews of the Lapshun and Conticello book on the same opening receiving serious criticism for their comparatively thin coverage; this cannot be said of the present volume. In fact, I think there is too much information here.

Sometimes we think the point of an opening book is to acquire information. That's true, but only up to a point. A good database will give us loads of information, but if the games aren't annotated and we don't know how to weight the information that's there, it presents the opposite problem. Now instead of lacking information, we're drowning in it. Thefore, the main reasons to buy an opening book are to get rid of the excess information we get in a database and to learn what ideas, move orders and plans are important. It's not to know or have access to every single idea in every single variation of an opening or line. As this work is much more like a print database than a typical opening book, the reader will have to sift through a colossal amount of material to develop a repertoire, and the strategic advice is comparatively sparse.

Bottom line: Konikowski and Sosynski have put in an incredible amount of effort compiling the material and including their own analysis. This includes a great deal of material from Sokolsky himself, which is quite valuable to English readers lacking access to the founding father's works. That's to K & S's credit. Unfortunately, the product is still in too raw a form for all but devoted fans of 1.b4. If you're a serious 1.b4 player, then it's a must-buy based on its thoroughness. If you're looking for an intro, however, it's a lot less useful.

The book is available here.

Posted by Dennis Monokroussos on Friday June 5, 2009 at 3:20am. 0 Comments 0 Trackbacks

Monday, June 1, 2009

Alexander Alekhine's Nottingham 1936 (21st Century Edition): A Brief Review

The folks over at the Chess Cafe (Russell Enterprises) have been re-releasing old tournament books lately (St. Petersburg 1909, New York 1924), and their newest offering is Alexander Alekhine's classic Nottingham 1936 (available here and here [for a significantly better price - if you're willing to wait until August]). In the following brief review I will first discuss the tournament, then the book in its own right, and finally the new edition of the book.

Part I: Nottingham 1936, The Tournament

Nottingham 1936 was one of the great chess events of all time. Former world champions Emanuel Lasker (1894-1921), Jose Raul Capablanca (1921-1927) and Alexander Alekhine (1927-1935) were playing, along with then-current champion Max Euwe (1935-1937). To add to the colossal strength, two future champions were playing - the aforementioned Alekhine, who would reclaim his title a year later and keep it until his death in 1946, and Mikhail Botvinnik, who was champion from 1948-1963, with two one-year breaks (1957-8, 1960-1). This means that there were five players in this tournament who, together, possessed the world championship title from 1894 to 1963, excepting two years when it was held by others and two years when the title was vacant. That's sixty-six years' worth of world champions!

The non-champ portion of the field was impressive, too. There was Reuben Fine, who in 1938 tied for first in what was a sort of Candidates event, and who could have played in the 1948 World Championship. There was Sammy Reshevsky, who did play in the 1948 Championship and was among the world's elite from the 1930s through the 1960s. Salo Flohr was one of the world's very best players in the early 1930s, Efim Bogoljubow had played in two world championship matches (in 1929 and 1934) and had won some very strong events in the past decade, and Milan Vidmar and Savielly Tartakower were comparatively lesser but still very strong GMs (by contemporary standards) in their own right. Only the British players (Tylor, Alexander, Thomas and Winter) were comparative cannon fodder, and yet they each played a small role as spoiler.

As it turned out, the tournament was very closely contested. Botvinnik and Capablanca tied for first in what was the last great result of the Cuban's chess career. They finished with 10 points, half a point ahead of Fine, Reshevsky, and Euwe. Alekhine had 9, Flohr and Lasker 8½, while the next closest finisher was a full 2½ points behind. There were many classic games, and a lot of fight too. Even among the prizewinners there was a good deal of bloodletting - it wasn't just the visitors wiping out the locals.

Part II: Nottingham 1936, The Book

Now to the book. All the games are annotated by Alexander Alekhine, and his notes make for instructive and lively reading. No one will confuse his comments with a Rybka printout, but his notes are clear, instructive, and punchy. (You can find an excerpt here here, on the Chess Cafe website.) Among the more amusing comments by Alekhine are his comments to the ending of Tylor-Flohr, which he describes as a four-step plan:

"From now a pretty dull affair begins. In order to make a long story short it is better, I think, to divide the following play into sections.

"I. Black prepares and finally plays f6 in order to free the c5-square for his king.

"II. Black prepares and actually plays b5.

"III. Black gradually brings his passed pawn to a3 where it is weaker than at a5!

"IV. Black prepares and at last makes the decisive mistake."

About this mistake, Alekhine writes that

"There were some voices in the press which attributed Flohr's failure at Nottingham to 'bad luck,' and especially to the fact that he lost two points to the British players, against whom he had previously had good results. The present game, more than any other, shows that such an appreciation is entirely wrong: Because a master, who, not being able to win through his own ability, tries to gain a point by exhausting a less physically trained opponent, fully deserves to lose."

Take that, sitzfleischers!

As all the games can be found in many databases, it's the notes that make or break the book. To my mind, they make the book worth having - not only as an historical document and as entertainment, but also to see some great games and to see chess understanding as it starts evolving into something modern.

Part III: This Edition of the Book

As usual, my feelings are mixed. The pluses: the book is in print again, and has been updated into algebraic notation. If, like me, you're "bilingual", then it's not so important; but as many players are unfamiliar with or averse to descriptive notation, it's a worthwhile change.

The format is in the typical Russell Enterprises/Chess Cafe style (which you can see for yourself at the link given above), but while this was a colossal improvement over the earlier editions of St. Petersburg 1909 and New York 1924, the Dover edition of Nottingham 1936 is already eminently readable. The new book is a little cleaner and nicer, but it's only a small upgrade in this case. Another minor plus for the new edition is a foreword by GM Andy Soltis.

Unfortunately, there are some negatives, too. Some minor errors and oddities were easy to find. For instance, the table of contents refers to the "Index of Opening". Another example: in the excerpt linked to above, in the note after Black's 6th move in Alekhine-Capablanca, an opening variation is referred to using descriptive rather than algebraic notation. Another error: in the paragraph giving the scores after round 14, an asterisk indicating that Capablanca had already had his bye is missing next to his name. I also noticed at least one typo in the notation, but couldn't find it again on a quick browsing. These are minor points; alas, there is worse to come.

As with the Russell Enterprise editions of St. Petersburg 1909 and New York 1924, some of the supplementary material has been excised. (In this case, almost all of it.) (1) W. H. Watts' 7-page introduction is gone, as is (2) E. G. R. Cordingly's tabular Openings Index. (The book has a more typical, less descriptive index.) But wait - there's less! The new edition (3) also excises six games from the simultaneously held minor tournament, of which five games are annotated by Alekhine. Also AWOL are (4) the round-by-round score table, (5) the dedication (to Alderman J. N. Derbyshire), and (6) proper credit for the round reports. The reports are included in the new edition, but one is led to assume they are by Alekhine. They're not: it was A. J. Mackenzie who deserves the credit.

All told, my dismay over these omissions - especially the latter, which while the least interesting represents the biggest sin against history - outweighs my appreciation for this book. If you're not descriptive-phobic and can find an affordable version of the 1962 Dover reprint, buy that. I've also noticed that there's a 2002 edition published by Hardinge Simpole; if it's faithful to the original text (except for updating to algebraic notation), then I would recommend purchasing it instead. (If any readers have it and can tell me how it fares, please do in the comments.)

Russell Enterprises can only be commended for its choices when it comes to deciding which old books to reissue, and their catalog of old and new books (e.g. by Mark Dvoretsky and Karsten Müller) places them among the elite chess publishers of our day. But their habit of excising auxiliary material (see the links to the earlier reviews for further examples) is a serious negative, so much so in this case that I cannot endorse this edition if earlier ones are available. If omission (6) is remedied in a subsequent printing, I will change my assessment; happily so if (at least) omissions (1), (3) and (5) as rectified as well. (But why not fix them all?)

Posted by Dennis Monokroussos on Monday June 1, 2009 at 4:24am. 4 Comments 0 Trackbacks

Thursday, April 2, 2009

Kasimdzhanov's Attacking the King - For Experts

That's the title of the latest ChessBase DVD presented by former FIDE champion Rustam Kasimdzhanov. There are 23 clips, generally about 10 minutes apiece, 21 of which present attacks from game fragments. There's a brief intro, then one fragment apiece for the world champions from Steinitz through Kasparov, then eight fragments from Kasimdzhanov's own play, and finally a brief wrap-up.*

Who is it for? It's not really for the student looking for a didactic presentation. For that, a book like the Vukovic classic The Art of Attack is your best bet, and for more advanced players Aagaard's Attacking Manual 1 (and whenever it comes out, vol. 2) is the way to go. Generally speaking, it has to be this way: the amount of material in a video is minuscule in comparison with a book's contents.

If you're curious about the video for entertainment purposes, then it's worth considering. The games are well chosen on several levels. First, they are extremely diverse. Some attacks feature open centers, some closed. Sometimes they involve some sort of classical build-up, sometimes they seem to come out of a clear blue sky. Some flow naturally from overt positional factors; on other occasions, it seems like nothing other than tactical legerdemain. (And so on.) Second, Kasimdzhanov has attempted to present attacking games from the world champions that are characteristic of their style, and in this I think he has succeeded. That makes the disc a nice intro to the world champions, for those who are new to the game's history. Finally, his own games are very nice as well. He has a very active and even tricky style, and for us we get the best of both worlds: on the one hand he's a great player, so his games are at an extremely high level; on the other, he rarely plays in the absolutely highest-level events, so his games are usually new to us.

By emphasizing the disc's entertainment value while denying its role as a sort of primer, I don't mean that there's nothing to learn from the material. As with any collection of outstanding games, especially when they are annotated, the reader or viewer can benefit greatly by its study. So if one watches interactively, frequently stopping the video and trying to work everything out first, the training value can be significant. If not, then it's basically (good) entertainment.

* In two cases the "fragment" includes the whole game. For those who are concerned to have the entire game, fear not: all the games are given in full elsewhere on the disc.

Posted by Dennis Monokroussos on Thursday April 2, 2009 at 3:12pm. 0 Comments 0 Trackbacks

Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Book Notice: Scandinavian Defense: The Dynamic 3...Qd6 by Michael Melts

Michael Melts, The Scandinavian Defense: The Dynamic 3...Qd6 (Russell Enterprises 2009); $29.95. (Available here.) Reviewed by Dennis Monokroussos.

To be honest, the opening line 1.e4 d5 2.exd5 Qxd5 3.Nc3 Qd6 isn't one I know very well, nor one I have much interest in taking up at this point. What I can say is that the new book on this system by Michael Melts (the second edition of a 2001 book) is insanely detailed. It's packed like an openings encyclopedia with game references and analysis; indeed, one might think that every 3...Qd6 game in history is included.

I'll list some pros and cons, but be aware that this is not a detailed review based on my thorough investigation of the book. With that caveat, then, let's continue.

PROS:

1. As mentioned above, the coverage is encyclopedic. As a source book, one would be hard-pressed to top this.

2. It's an economical system, by which I mean that it's pretty well one-stop shopping against 1.e4. If you want to play the Najdorf Sicilian, you first have to worry about 2.a3, 2.b4, 2.c3, 2.d4 and 2.Nc3; then after 2.Nf3 d6 there's 3.Nc3, 3.Bc4 and 3.Bb5+; after 3.d4 cxd4 there's 4.Qxd4; and even after 4.Nxd4 Nf6 there's 5.f3 and even 5.Bc4. After 1.e4 d5, however, there's really just 2.Nc3 and 2.d4 to worry about, and they're not much of a worry.

3. It's probably not such a bad system, either. Tiviakov has been playing it regularly for several years now, with generally good results, and other strong (2600+) GMs like Nisipeanu, Almasi, Dreev and Gashimov have experimented with it as well.

CONS:

1. Almost all of the book comprises variations, whether game citations or original analysis. Once the book gets going, there's almost no hand-holding for the reader, explaining what's going on, what to do next, etc.

Reply: This is mitigated somewhat by a 32 page chapter (or "Part") called "Information for Club Players", which is geared to readers in the 1400-2000 range. Ironically, a fair chunk of this chapter is in the same vein - moves without explanations - but overall it's still useful. The chapter includes examples of "opening catastrophes" for White and "typical mistakes" for Black, and then offers some tidbits on the major structures Black can choose after 1.e4 d5 2.exd5 Qxd5 3.Nc3 Qd6 4.d4 Nf6. There's a subsection on ...c6 approaches, ...a6 approaches, and ...g6 approaches (the latter is the specialty of GM Bojan Kurajica). Melts rounds out the chapter with recommendations - a commendable inclusion.

All the same, the explanations look awfully superficial to me, and there's much that goes on in the main chapters that isn't conceptually addressed in the info chapter or elsewhere. Here's an example, from Charbonneau-Kamsky, Montreal 2007, which is the first "official" game in the book: 1.e4 d5 2.exd5 Qxd5 3.Nc3 Qd6 4.d4 Nf6 5.Bc4 c6 6.Nf3 Be6. After two pages discussing Black's 6th move alternatives, Melts writes this: "With 6...Be6 Black plans to exchange light-squared bishops." Well, yes, that's pretty clear, but should he? Is it better here than on f5 or g4, and is there any general strategic reason we can appeal to for understanding? And if it is, does that mean that White should avoid 5.Bc4?

Continuing with the game, White played 7.Bxe6, and after 7...Qxe6+ Melts says that Black has no problems. Here's the note to White's 7th move, in full:

7.Bd3 (7.Bb3!?; for 7.Ne5 see 4.d4 Nf6 5.Nf3 c6 6.Ne5 Be6 7.Bc4, Game 17) 7...Nbd7 (Schallueck, H. - Klawitter, B., Hamburg 2004) 8.0-0+=; 7...Bg4 - Game 13; 7...Na6!? 8.a3 g6.

At the end of the game Melts writes that "White needs to play 7.Bb3, 7.Bd3 or 7.Ne5." Ok, maybe so, but why was White's choice bad? What did he allow in the position that he shouldn't, or what did he fail to pursue that he should have? If 7.Bxe6 Qxe6+ was nothing, then why is 7.Bb3 Bxb3 8.axb3 Qe6+ something? Is Black supposed to castle long here (he doesn't in Charbonneau-Kamsky), but not now thanks to the half-open a-file, or is that file just a generic asset for White, or is the issue that a pawn on b3 supports a knight or other piece on c4? The point isn't that Melts should explain everything, but that almost nothing is explained. Even Boris Avrukh's 1.d4! repertoire book and the Khalifman books, both of which are primarily geared towards professional and near-professional players, offer the reader more help than Melts does.

2. Who is Melts? OTB, there's not much to see: I didn't find a FIDE rating, and he has a 2100 USCF rating based on only three tournaments. On the other hand, he's an IM in correspondence chess, so even if he's not as strong a practical player as the typical openings book author, he clearly has some skill in analysis.

In summary, it is clear that Melts has put a lot of effort into this book, and even if Khalifman or some other elite author could puncture his analysis, I imagine it should hold up pretty well in the rough-and-tumble world most of us inhabit. Whether you want to play this system is up to you, but if you do you will surely want this as a sourcebook. As I've suggested, it's rather thin on explanation (even with the one special chapter taken into account), so my recommendation is that players on the lower end of the 1400-2000 spectrum only consider taking this up if they are already reasonably familiar with the main line Scandinavian, or perhaps the Caro-Kann or the Fort Knox French.

Posted by Dennis Monokroussos on Wednesday March 25, 2009 at 1:32am. 2 Comments 0 Trackbacks

Thursday, March 19, 2009

Book Notice: Khalifman's New Anti-Dragon Book

Alexander Khalifman, Opening for White according to Anand 1.e4, Vol. 11 (Chess Stars 2009). 444 pp. ($29.99 here.) Reviewed by Dennis Monokroussos.

Former FIDE World Champion Alexander Khalifman has been writing opening repertoire books throughout this decade, in a number of multi-volume projects. There was "Opening for White According to Kramnik", "Opening for Black According to Karpov", and the most recent series, "Opening for White According to Anand". The players mentioned aren't collaborators in the series, and the games cited and analysis proposed in each book in the series extends beyond what those greats played and wrote. Still, the repertoire Khalifman proposes is well-based on what those champions played (and play), and as such it offers the reader a fundamentally stable repertoire based on main lines tested at the very highest level.

The "Anand" series is up to volume 11 (or XI, to use the numerals used by Chess Stars), and is based on 1.e4. (This was Anand's almost exclusive choice prior to the Kramnik match.) All 444 dense pages of volume XI are devoted to the Dragon and the Accelerated Dragon, and since his treatment of the Accelerated Dragon is based on 5.Nc3 approaches, it's pretty much a pure Dragon book.)

The book came out right at the start of the year, and given Chess Stars' estimable habit of speedy publication, readers can trust the book as expressing the state of the art as of the end of 2008. Likewise, the Khalifman books are consistently detailed, and this volume is no exception. In the opening books by him that I've examined closely, he invariably starts by looking at even poor moves before turning to the meat, and does so without giving short shrift to either the side- or the mainlines. Want proof? You can find the full table of contents (or more accurately, index of variations) here.

I would not consider myself a Dragon specialist for either side (one of the leading Dragon specialists, GM Mikhail Golubev, has reviewed and lauded the book for Chess Today), but there are some lines I have examined for my own use and in annotating games for the blog. One variation I spent a good deal of time on several years ago arises after 1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 d6 3.d4 cxd4 4.Nxd4 Nf6 5.Nc3 g6 6.Be3 Bg7 7.f3 0-0 8.Qd2 Nc6 9.Bc4 Bd7 10.Bb3 Nxd4 11.Bxd4 b5. (This came up for me via an Accelerated Dragon move order: 2...Nc6 3.d4 cxd4 4.Nxd4 g6 5.Nc3 Bg7 6.Be3 Nf6 7.Bc4 0-0 8.Bb3 d6 9.f3 Bd7 10.Qd2 Nxd4 11.Bxd4 b5.)

White has two main moves here; ironically, they are rook-pawn pushes on opposite sides of the board. White can choose the prophylactic 12.a4 or the sharp and bloodthirsty 12.h4. I prepared the latter move for my intended opponent, found some nice new ideas, and won a nice game (though without getting to use the best part of my preparation). Some time later I saw Bologan successfully use a very similar idea in a game with Moldovan, and I've followed and discussed the path of this variation on the blog off and on the past few years.

Naturally, I was curious to see how well my old analysis held up in Khalifman's eyes, and was surprised to learn that he advocates 12.a4 instead. Even so, Khalifman's consistent thoroughness deserves praise, and he spends over half a page with dense analysis of 12.h4 to justify his rejection of that approach. (Readers should not fear that a large chunk of the book is wasted [from White's point of view] on lines he discards. When Khalifman discusses White alternatives, it's generally to explain why he prefers one major node over another.) His arguments for 12.a4 are plausible: he thinks White gains at least a slight edge with it (generally a clear edge) and that 12.h4 is both objectively good for Black and gives him the easier, more fun position to handle. (I take a look at his suggestions here - see the first game.)

Turning to a more topical variation, he spends a little over eight pages on the almost brand-new "Carlsen Variation": 1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 d6 3.d4 cxd4 4.Nxd4 Nf6 5.Nc3 g6 6.Be3 Bg7 7.f3 0-0 8.Qd2 Nc6 9.Bc4 Bd7 10.Bb3 Rc8 11.0-0-0 Ne5 12.Kb1 a6

Khalifman's treatment includes discussion of the high-level 2008 games Dominguez Perez-Carlsen from Biel, Topalov-Carlsen from Bilbao, Anand-Carlsen from Mainz and Karjakin-Radajbov from Sochi and a whole lot more besides. Naturally, his coverage is deeper than what I offered on this blog (I'd hope so!), but it's still interesting to compare conclusions. (Which I do here - see the second game.)

To conclude this review, let me say that this book appears characteristic of the series. The coverage is thorough and the analysis is deep, but with a fair amount of verbal explanation to help the reader. In the past, I've noticed that Khalifman's analysis can sometimes be a little biased for the repertoire side and perhaps under-reliant on computers (even in tactical lines), but I didn't notice any problems this time around. (Granted, I've only checked a very small percentage of the book.) Even so, I'm happy to have the earlier volumes, and this is an obvious must-have for any serious Dragon player. Similarly, it's a must-have for the target audience as well; i.e. for anyone who faces main line Dragons (and Accelerated Dragons without 5.c4 - mention this, and that an earlier book in the Kramnik series covers that approach). I think 1800s and up can benefit from this book; players below that figure but not too far from it might try it as well, at least if they're devoted Dragoneers. Below that, and I think it's probably both a bit too much and a misallocation of resources - there are far more important things to do than learning heavy-duty Dragon theory.

Posted by Dennis Monokroussos on Thursday March 19, 2009 at 11:09pm. 0 Comments 0 Trackbacks

Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Book Notice: Kasparov: How His Predecessors Misled Him About Chess

IM Tibor Karolyi and Nick Aplin have already written a valuable pair of books on Garry Kasparov's career (Kasparov's Fighting Chess: 1993-1998 and Kasparov's Fighting Chess: 1999-2005); now they have written a third and much lighter work on the 13th world champion. Originally conceived as an article for the satirical chess magazine Kingpin, Kasparov: How His Predecessors Misled Him About Chess (I'll subsequently abbreviate this as MMP, for "My Misleading Predecessors") is something like My Great Predecessors meets How to Beat Bobby Fischer meets The Screwtape Letters.

The basic structure of MMP is a first-person narrative wherein "Kasparov" (i.e. them speaking as Kasparov) blames his predecessors for his losses. In each chapter, going in reverse chronological order, "Kasparov" presents games where his predecessors succeeded with a given idea or motif, one which he used in his own games and then lost. It's a clever concept, and beneath the humor there's the salutary reminder that ideas and "rules" are not absolutes: a motif that's strong or useful in one position may not be in another.

As I mentioned, the authors originally intended this concept for magazine publication, but as the material kept accumulating they decided to turn it into a full book. I'm a fan of their work (in addition to the works mentioned above, they've also written an excellent work on Karpov's endgames) and appreciate their concept, but I'm not sure this idea merits 271 pages. The problem is twofold, and the problems are somewhat interrelated. The first is that the humorous aspect wears off after a while; the second is that the instructional element is sometimes subsumed for the sake of the joke. The first problem requires no further explanation, but the second does.

What I mean is this: sometimes, the relationship between the predecessors' games and Kasparov's is pretty close. In those cases, the book's premise works and the instructional value is greater. On other occasions, however, the connection between the predecessors' successes and Kasparov's failures is tenuous at best. This can occur in three ways:

(1) The resemblance between the idea in the earlier games and Kasparov's is relatively negligible. (Of course there must be some disanalogy, given that the predecessors win and Kasparov loses, but the degree of disanalogy varies.)

(2) The resemblance is reasonably close, but there was nothing wrong with Kasparov's use of the idea.

(3) The resemblance is reasonably close, but there was nothing special about the predecessors' use of the idea.

To be clear, I'm not claiming that all of the examples are like this - not at all. The need to keep the blame-the-predecessor theme going through the book does force the authors to stretch the parallels, however, on a relatively regular basis. On the other hand, the games - both Kasparov's and his predecessors' - are all you'd expect from world champions, and the Karolyi/Aplin notes are instructive (though generally (much) lighter than what you'd expect from their previous books, referred to above).

So I must offer a mixed verdict. I can't quite recommend it, but I certainly wouldn't recommend against it either. There is much that's worthwhile in the book, and I think fans of How to Beat Bobby Fischer may be similarly fascinated by a book with a lot of great chess and many, maybe most of Kasparov's losses.

Posted by Dennis Monokroussos on Tuesday March 3, 2009 at 10:56pm. 4 Comments 0 Trackbacks

Sunday, March 1, 2009

A Short Book Review of Igor Sukhin's Gary's Adventures in Chess Country

Let me start by noting that I'm no expert in the beginner-book genre, much less in the sub-genre intended for young children. That said, I think Igor Sukhin's Gary's Adventures in Chess Country (Mongoose Press, 2009; $23.95) is a book that can be profitably used for and by youngsters to teach them the game and to get them on their way to developing some important but non-traditional skills.

It's a colorful book with oversized pages and lots of illustrations, and as the title suggests it tells a story. (It's at least reminiscent of the Fritz & Chesster disc, though each has its own strengths.) Gary is a youngster who opens the door one day to find Cassie and her magical six-seat tricycle ready to spirit him away to Chess Country. (Don't worry, it's not Kalmykia.) While there he meets Riddles (his primary teacher), Zug (the [redeemable] villain, with whom he has a final showdown), the mysterious FRD and various chess pieces.

One chapter at a time, we see him learn how each piece moves followed by a discussion of checkmate and stalemate. Each step of the way there are review questions, some of which require thinking beyond the bare information presented, and then there are position puzzles. These are excellent, and I think they are valuable for non-beginners of all ages as a way to improve one's board vision.

By way of example, let's take the chapter on the knight. After the verbal questions, we have a series of exercise sets, each with six positions. called "To take or not to take?" In each case a knight is involved - though it's not always the piece to be moved - and while the side to move can capture a piece in each puzzle, there are cases where it can be recaptured. (In those cases, the answer to the question is "no".)

Next up: six "Army of One" positions, where the white knight gobbles up all Black's pieces seriatim. It's not challenging, but what it does do is help the student "see" what the knight can do, and to see it more quickly. Along the same lines, but moving up a level of abstraction, there's "Capture the Flag", in which the goal is to maneuver the knight from its current square to another square with a red flag.

The next exercise ratchets up the difficulty a couple of notches. Labeled "Amazing Maze", the positions again feature a knight and a square with a red flag, but the maneuvering is made much more difficult by the presence of minesweeper-like mines on many of the squares. Getting from point A to point B is far more difficult here, and working through these exercises offers a nice challenge for the youngster's maneuvering ability and thinking skills.

After this, it's time for a bit of a break, challenge-wise, with a set of puzzles called "Attack the Enemy". As you might expect, the aim is to attack the enemy piece with the knight, and in each case this is achieved in one move. Sukhin then, once again, builds on what has gone before with "Double Attack". This is a series of one-movers where two pieces are attacked. Usefully, the knight does the attacking sometimes, but in other positions it's the victim. This helps the beginner remember the other pieces and how they move, and further memory assistance comes in the next section, in which the goal is to capture the only black piece that is not protected.

Then it's time for another concept, "Defense", when White must find the only move that avoids losing a piece. Conversely, the next set is "Win a Piece", wherein the goal is just what it sounds like. There are five more sections after this, some of which are among his best ideas, but you'll have to get the book to find them. (Or find someone else who will blab.) I think it will be clear that a child or other beginning student who works through all the exercises in this book will have a huge advantage, tactically, over someone who learns the game by more conventional means.

The book doesn't teach the newbie everything he or she needs to know - the center is discussed, but only very briefly, and principles like rapid development and the value of castling early, etc. are not discussed. That's not a flaw in the book, of course; I bring it up only so the buyer has a sense of what is and isn't included. And for what it is, I like it a lot, but I'd like to hear back from anyone who has field-tested it, too.

I do have a couple of complaints; the first quite minor, the second a little more serious. First, a mild formatting complaint: The style of the white king should be changed - you can only tell that it's white's piece when contrasting it with its counterpart. It doesn't have the same shading as the rest of its army, and stylistically it doesn't fit in either (it's oversized).

A more important complaint, one that could easily frustrate a child or beginner using the book without a teacher's help: In the earlier chapters with "Get to the Base" puzzles, an important condition is missing from the instructions. The goal is to get a particular piece to a target square in a given number of moves, overcoming enemy resistance. There are several examples where the opponent can make the task take more moves than permitted by giving away the piece, but that "spite resistance" is not allowed is not mentioned until the chapter on knights. It's also not mentioned in the earlier chapters that the goal is to reach the "base" safely.

Two examples to illustrate. First, the "spite defense" problem: White queen on f3, Black queen on b4, flag on h8, mines on g7 and h7. The goal is for White to reached the flag in two moves, and the solution is supposed to be 1.Qa8 followed by 2.Qh8. The problem, of course, with making it a two-move puzzle with no restrictions on Black is that Black can play 1...Qb8 or 1...Qf8, making it take three moves rather than two.

Second, about the failure to specify that White must reach the base safely, take this example: white queen on h1, black bishop on b8, flag on d4. White can get to d4 in two moves very easily, via a1, d1, d5, e4, g1, h4 and h8. It's only via a1 that White can prevent Black's bishop from guarding d4; or rather, from safely guarding it. So we have a sort of conjoined problem, because Black can meet 1.Qa1 with 1...Ba7 or 1...Be5. If White goes to d4 on his second move, he achieves the stated goal but loses the queen, and in that case 1.Qa1 is no better than any of the other moves. On the other hand, if White takes the bishop on a7 or e5, then it's a three move job. So the instructions need to include something about hanging pieces to be complete.

Finally, I noticed an interesting ontological claim in the chapter on pawns. Here's a bit of dialog:

"Right, Gary, very good!" the big Pawn said. "How about this one: can a pawn visit all the squares of the chessboard?"

"No!" all the other children replied in unison.

Gary smiled. He realized why it was such a tricky question. "Yes, it can. It can get to the last rank, turn into a queen, for example, and walk to any square it wants!"

"Perfect!" the big Pawn said, smiling again at Gary.

Do we really have the same piece before and after promotion? If so, what is the ground of its "personal" identity through time? I wouldn't bet the house on it, but I'm more inclined to agree with the (other) children against Gary and the big Pawn - especially since queens can't capture en passant!

Anyway, it's a nice book for teaching beginners, and - with the repeated proviso that I'm not a specialist in this genre - I recommend it.

Posted by Dennis Monokroussos on Sunday March 1, 2009 at 9:10pm. 7 Comments 0 Trackbacks

New York 1924: A Brief Review and a Plug

Alexander Alekhine, New York 1924, 21st Century Edition (Milford, CT: Russell Enterprises, 2008). $29.95. Reviewed by Dennis Monokroussos

Nowadays there’s a super-grandmaster tournament almost every other week, but it wasn’t always so. (Ah, 2007, the good old days.) In fact, there was a time when there were years rather than just days, weeks or months between tournaments. How remarkable, then, that in early 1924 the organizers were able to round up a field with the then-current world champion and his predecessor, not to mention the man who would win the championship three years later. Three more participants contested world championship matches without winning the title (two past, one a few years later), and the remaining players were strong as well. Only one player could really be called an outsider, and while he finished near the bottom, he had the best score by a non-prize winner against the prize-winners!

Let’s elaborate. In a few months, the organizers were able to get the then-current champion, Jose Capablanca; his predecessor, Emanuel Lasker; and his successor, Alexander Alekhine. Frank Marshall and Dawid Janowski, who had lost world championship matches to Lasker, both played, as did later two-time championship match loser Efim Bogoljubow. Richard Reti was in good form, and Geza Maroczy and Savielly Tartakower were also leading players. Frederick Yates wasn’t of their caliber, but he was a strong player with wins over many of the world’s best players, and finally Emanuel Lasker’s distant cousing Edward Lasker filled out the field.

These 11 players went at it in a double round-robin. That’s right, 20 games, a distance which might cause contemporary players to die of exhaustion. The first half was a real horse race. Lasker led, but Reti, Alekhine and Capablanca were all fighting it out for first place. Capablanca had started very slowly, with four draws and a loss to Reti, his first loss in many years. After that he kicked into it gear, and with a win over Emanuel Lasker in the second cycle made the race interesting. Unfortunately for him, Lasker’s form stayed (exceptionally) strong, and the 55-year-old ex-champion won with an impressive 16-4 score, a point and a half ahead of Capablanca and further two and a half points ahead of Alekhine.

The tournament was very hard fought with only 38 draws in 110 games. Many of the games remain famous today (Reti-Bogoljubow, Marshall-Bogoljubow, Capablanca-Lasker, Reti-Capablanca, the Capablanca-Tartakower rook ending, the Em. Lasker-Ed. Lasker ending with knight against rook and pawn all come immediately to mind), and there are many more games of interest that aren’t as well known (for example, the Janowski-Ed. Lasker game I presented in a recent ChessBase show). Of course the games are all available in any worthwhile database, but part of what makes the tournament book valuable is that all the games are thoroughly annotated by Alekhine. Alekhine’s notes aren’t perfect (proof here; further, on the subject of errata, Edward Winter notes a game score error here - item 6009), but he was a fine analyst and communicator.

The last issue to discuss is the new edition, from Russell Enterprises. While some side features of the original were eliminated – and I don’t know why – the improvements in the layout (clearer, whiter pages; much crisper diagrams; notes incorporated into the games rather than given at the end in a series of footnotes) and the conversion from descriptive to algebraic notation make this edition a worthy buy for chess fans with any interest in the history of the game.

Highly recommended to all but the most utilitarian of chess fans.

Posted by Dennis Monokroussos on Sunday March 1, 2009 at 12:50am. 4 Comments 0 Trackbacks

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Quick Book Review: Yusupov's Build Up Your Chess 1 - The Fundamentals

Artur Yusupov, Build Up Your Chess 1: The Fundamentals (Quality Chess 2008). 261 pp. €23.99/£15.99/$29.95. Reviewed by Dennis Monokroussos.

Artur Yusupov should be well-known to chess fans. Three times in the 1980s and '90s he made it to the semi-finals of the Candidates, and in addition to his many successes on the chessboard, he has enjoyed a very successful literary collaboration with über-trainer Mark Dvoretsky. Based on their works, you might expect this book to be another mind-buster like Dvoretsky's Analytical Manual. That was my assumption, at any rate, but it was a mistaken one.

What then can we expect from this work? It's the first in what should be a series of three books, which are together drawn from a three-year training program he used in his chess academy. The most elementary year's program was for players under 1500, the second year for those under 1800, and the last for those under 2100. Each year's curriculum featured 24 modules with a test after each and an overall exam at the very end, and the book under review presents the first year's curriculum.

The material is uneven in difficulty, and at first I found this confusing. Some units covered really elementary material, while some positions in other units were considerably more sophisticated. (Not master-level sophistication, but a jump up from other material in adjacent units.) The way I understand it at this point makes sense of this disparity, however. First, the book, like the training program it came from, is in some ways ideally suited for teachers/trainers, though Yusupov has done a nice job of organizing the material for self-use. Second, it's better to think of the material as giving the budding player everything needed to reach 1500. That includes quite a lot, so it's understandable that not all the material will be equally challenging.

Verdict: Worth considering for teachers and those under 1500, though it shouldn't be thought of us as the only book such a player will or should ever use prior to attaining that rating.

The book is available here and here, among other places.

Posted by Dennis Monokroussos on Tuesday November 11, 2008 at 1:40am. 0 Comments 0 Trackbacks

Monday, November 10, 2008

A Brief Review: Lasker's Manual of Chess

Emanuel Lasker, Lasker's Manual of Chess (Russell Enterprises 2008). 227 pp. $29.95. Reviewed by Dennis Monokroussos

Concluding our triptych of reviews of Russell Enterprises books, we'll finish with a few brief comments on their reissue of Lasker's Manual of Chess. The "New 21st Century Edition!", edited by Taylor Kingston and with a foreword by Mark Dvoretsky, does the original credit. I'll list its features below, but first, here's a summary of the book's contents and its unifying theme.

The book comprises six parts - Lasker calls them "books" - and from an instructional point of view can be seen as clearing a path for the absolute beginner to reach the point where no one can give him material odds (Lasker hints at this near the end of book 6; the rating some think he has in mind is around 1800).

The first book ("The Elements of Chess") presents the rules and a bit more besides - some basic mates, the opposition and the concept of zugzwang, for starters.

The second book ("The Theory of the Openings") offers brief discussions of a great many openings, together with some general remarks about the opening per se and an interesting table offering numerical values not only for the pieces (which often differ, depending on which pawn it is or, intriguingly, if it is a kingside bishop or rook vs. its queenside counterpart) but for which move of the game it is.

The third book, "The Combination", likewise combines a wide array of specific examples with general reflections on the topic (e.g. its preconditions, choosing among combinative possibilities and rejecting the "beauty" of combinations that are unsound or make matters unnecessarily complicated).

The fourth book, "Position Play", starts with a discussion of the idea of the plan, and then launches into a discussion on the history of planning in chess. Most of the chapter is an extended tribute to Steinitz and an investigation into the latter's theory of chess, and it is this discussion for which Lasker's Manual is most remembered today. According to Lasker, Steinitz realized that plans on the chessboard are properly based not on a player's "genius" but on the position on the board. Further,

the position on the board must show a sign, a characteristic moment, which tells us what plan to follow and thus relieve us of the necessity of searching through an immense mass of variations. It is not enough, of course, to assert the existence of such signs; they have to be pointed out and proven true. Such marks, evidently, would be for the painfully seeking chess master what the "philosopher's stone" promised to be to the alchemists. These alchemists had passionately searched for that stone many centuries, had consistently failed to find it and had become objects of derision. Steinitz had the colossal boldness to believe in such a stone, available, it is true, not for science, but for the chess master.

The fifth book, "The Aesthetic Effect in Chess", is the shortest of the volume, and looks at and reflects upon beauty in chess as exhibited in actual games and in studies.

Finally, the sixth book, "Examples and Models", offers a large number of games and game fragments that illustrate the material presented throughout the book. As the examples are intended to put the final pedagogical touches on the work, Lasker offers some "final reflections on education in chess", and concludes in a big picture way with some thoughts "on the future of the theory of Steinitz".

The book is clearly not a beginner's book of the sort written today. Lasker includes all the basic info one would want, but goes way beyond it in his various reflections on method, pedagogy, theory (in the broadest sense) and history. And suffusing it all and giving the book its unity, according to Lasker, is the idea of chess:

What connects the parts of this manual is the idea of chess, by which I mean that force of mentality inherent in the game which has nourished it with the power of appealing to many people and to many generations, so as to enable it to live through many centuries and to spread and to prosper. This idea is itself a structure of noble design. As if it were a valuable work of art buried among debris, it has here been searched for and laboriously unearthed and brought to light by reviewing the history and reason and the life of the game. This idea is the idea of struggle, also of your struggle. [Preface, p. 20.]

I don't know how useful this book is, taken purely for its chess content. (Not bad, I suspect, but I'm sure that some other book or combination of books better fulfills that narrow task.) But its reflective components makes it a classic worth reading.

I close with a brief discussion of the new elements of this volume compared to the original (or at least the Dover edition in English). The pages are larger, allowing the book to be thinner - an improvement on the stocky original. Fred Reinfeld's "Appreciation" has been removed, but in its place Kingston has added a number of photographs and paragraphs of "Lasker Lore" which are interspersed throughout the text. Diagrams have been added, and the notation has been changed from descriptive to algebraic.

Warmly recommended as a thoughtful work of theoretical and historic interest.

Posted by Dennis Monokroussos on Monday November 10, 2008 at 2:20am. 2 Comments 0 Trackbacks

Sunday, November 9, 2008

Quick Book Review: James Vigus on the Slav

James Vigus, Play the Slav (Everyman 2008). 224 pp. $24.95/£14.99. Reviewed by Dennis Monokroussos.

James Vigus is a British FM probably best known to most of you for his enormous 2007 book on the Pirc. Those of you expecting another tome are in for a surprise, as Play the Slav (henceforth PTS) is substantially slimmer. PTS makes no pretense to encyclopedic coverage, but is very much a repertoire book. And here too the reader might be surprised, as I was, by the lines Vigus chose to cover. Let’s turn to that now.

In the absolute main line, I had expected to see discussion of sharp, trendy lines like 1.d4 d5 2.c4 c6 3.Nf3 Nf6 4.Nc3 dxc4 5.a4 Bf5 6.Ne5 Nbd7 7.Nxc4 e6 8.f3 Bb4 9.e4 Bxe4 10.fxe4 Nxe4 11.Bd2 Qxd4 12.Nxe4 Qxe4+ 13.Qe2 Bxd2+ 14.Kxd2 Qd5+ or 6...Nbd7 7.Nxc4 Qc7 8.g3 e5 9.dxe5 Nxe5 10.Bf4 Nfd7 11.Bg2 g5. But Vigus has sidestepped all of this; his main line is what he dubs the Sokolov Defence: 6...Nbd7 7.Nxc4 Nb6. I wasn't especially familiar with it when I received the book, but now I'm inclined to think it's an excellent if less flamboyant choice. It is solid, somewhat less well-known, and has a fine pedigree - it has been played by Kasparov, Anand and Ivanchuk, and has been played regularly not only by Ivan Sokolov but the young Chinese stars Bu Xiangzhi and Wang Yue.

This seems to be a general strategy for Vigus throughout the book, viz., presenting variations that aren't necessarily the most common choices, but that are solid, that don't require heavy memorization, and have proved their value at the highest levels. After the chapter on the Sokolov Defence, there are two chapters on the "Dutch Variation" (6.e3 e6 7.Bxc4 Bb4 8.O-O O-O); chapter 2 primarily examines 9.Qe2, while chapter 3 looks at 9.Qb3, 9.h3 and especially 9.Nh4 (against which he advocates the slightly rare 9...Bg4).

Turning to less common variations, chapter 4 covers 6.Nh4; here, as often in the book, he suggests the provocative 6...Bg4 (rather than the more deeply theoretical 6...e6) - see chapter 3, mentioned in the previous paragraph, and also chapter 7 where he presents "The Errot" ('Torre' backwards): 4.e3 Bg4. Going back, chapter 5 looks at the Tolush-Geller Gambit (4.Nf3 dxc4 5.e4!?), while chapter 6 looks at less common fifth moves (5.Ne5, 5.g3 and 5.e3).

Chapter 8 features the increasingly common (and often transpositional) queen moves 4.Qc2 and 4.Qb3, and after 4...dxc4 5.Qxc4 he once again he avoids the main move (in this case 5...Bf5) for his favorite perennial favorite - you guessed it - 5...Bg4.

In chapter 9 we go a step further back and examine 3.Nc3; against this he suggests the Argentinean Defence 3...dxc4. Chapter 10 looks at another 3rd move deviation, 3.cxd5, and while he doesn't offer a ...Bg4 line here, he does find another interesting semi-sideline: 3...cxd4 4.Nc3 Nf6 5.Nf3 Nc6 6.Bf4 Nh5. The book concludes with a brief odds and ends chapter, briefly examining 3.Bf4, 3.e3, and 3.Nf3 with a kingside fianchetto.

This is the theoretical coverage, and Vigus has done a conscientious job, offering some original analysis while interacting with all the obvious relevant sources in print at the time of his writing. But Vigus is also to be complimented on a 34-page introductory chapter. In it, he offers some helpful advice in dealing with the different sorts of pawn structures that typically arise from the main variations given above.

This is a good, up-to-date, workmanlike guide that will offer interested Slav (and Semi-Slav) players are very usable repertoire against 1.d4 d5 2.c4. Recommended.

Posted by Dennis Monokroussos on Sunday November 9, 2008 at 11:41pm. 0 Comments 0 Trackbacks

Quick Book Review: Dvoretsky's Analytical Manual

Mark Dvoretsky, Dvoretsky's Analytical Manual (Russell Enterprises, 2008). 419 pp. $34.95. Reviewed by Dennis Monokroussos.

Long-time readers of this blog will know that I'm a big fan of Mark Dvoretsky's work, and his latest book is no exception. This new work is not a unified monograph but a compilation of articles, some (but not all) of which have been published on the Chess Cafe - see his "The Instructor" columns. Not all of those columns are included, and those that have been have been re-checked and edited in some ways. Two useful features of the new edit: First, the positions to solve are awarded a certain number of stars to indicate the difficulty (1 star for the easiest positions, 5 for those that would cause Rybka to give up chess for something easy like nuclear physics). Second, the formatting of problems is better (though still not perfect). In the original Chess Cafe columns, it's often almost impossible to avoid seeing the answer, which is often given right alongside the diagram; here, it's below the diagram, making it possible to safely cover the answer in advance.

Those columns will give you a very good taste for what you'll find here, but a few synthetic comments are in order. A major element of Dvoretsky's chess philosophy is that a chess improvement comes through the development of one's analytical skill. That's precisely what this book is good for: there are analysis exercises of tremendous depth for the serious, strong student. The book is designed to be used with a trainer or a sparring partner within 100 points of one's own rating, but in a pinch one can go through the exercises solitaire-chess style.

That's what the book is; what it is not is a sort of middlegame companion piece to the earlier Dvoretsky's Endgame Manual. That work goes beyond the standard endgame textbook, but it is organized as a textbook and can be used in that way. Here, in the Analytical Manual, there isn't a corresponding principle of organization or unity.

Part 1, "Immersion in the Position", focuses on exercises where accurate calculation of variations is the primary task.

Part 2, "Analyzing the Endgame", is just what it sounds like. The reader doesn't get a discussion of topics like schematic thinking or the do-not-hurry principle, but is invited to calculate and analyze. (Example: there are 11 large, dense pages on the famous knight vs. bishop ending from game 9 of the first Karpov-Kasparov match.)

Part 3, "Games for Training Purposes", doesn't really differ from the material in the first two parts, except that the analysis continues for a whole game rather than a fragment.

In part 4, "Practical Psychology", the tone changes. Here there's an explicit acknowledgment of our inability to always get to the absolute bottom of things; sometimes our analyses must be supplemented by a psychologically informed intuition. Dvoretsky singles out three components of the psychological factor in chess, in descending order of importance: one's own psychology, the psychology of the "abstract opponent", and the character and playing style of our particular (non-abstract) opponent.

Finally, there's part 5, "Lasker the Great", which celebrates Lasker not as some sort of psychologist who focused on and exploiting his opponent's concrete weaknesses - Dvoretsky consider this a myth - but as a powerful fighter. Dvoretsky takes a close look at seven Lasker games (including a whopping 28 pages on his famous draw with Edward Lasker from New York 1924); four of them wins, but a loss and two draws as well.

In every game and fragment there are many places where Dvoretsky stops and challenges the reader to find the next move or moves. As you'll have gathered by now, these exercises are somewhere between challenging and impossible, so the question arises: who should buy this book? I like his answer, which I will now quote at length:

The materials which in the course of my entire career as a trainer I have squirreled away and prepared for study (and later, used in books), have been aimed at youthful talents, who have already achieved a certain level of mastery, or else for young and ambitious grandmasters. A few reviewers have upbraided me for the excessive complexity of my books, and their inaccessibility to the common amateur. There is no more sense in such complaints than there would be in upbraiding the author of a beginners' primer for not making a book interesting for masters and grandmasters. Every book has its intended audience; it is not possible to make them interesting and useful for everybody at once.

...The book which lies before you is aimed first of all at helping strong players complete themselves. This ensures that it will overflow with exceptionally complex analyses and exercises which will be difficult for even the leading grandmasters to handle. But I suggest that even amateur players will find something of interest in it. How can it not be interesting to peek - perhaps not as an owner, but at least as a guest - into the world of high-level chess, to see with one's own eyes what sort of problems chess "pros" have to wrestle with (successfully or not), and how far from being complete even their play is? The many exercises presented in this book differ greatly from one another in their level of difficulty: some are fairly simple and accessible. It makes sense to take a stab at solving the tougher exercises, too; then later, once you have seen the answer, you will have a better grasp of your own abilities, strengths and weaknesses. And finally: the analyses presented in this book include a multitude of most impressive passages, unusual and spectacular moves and combinations - and chessplayers of almost any grade can certainly find enjoyment in beauty. [From the Introduction, page 7.]

I agree with his reasoning, but fear that most buyers will look upon it as a holy book, and will take the equivalent of a sacred oath or a New Year's resolution to go through the work as their next step on the path to chess greatness. This "holy" book will then find its way to the blessed bookshelf, to be covered by sacramental dust.... The problem is that with such deep analysis, one doesn't want to look at the games superficially. But then to do it right takes hours, and for that one needs time and energy, and Hey - look at the cute bunny rabbit in the back yard! I wonder what's on TV tonight. See you tomorrow, Mr. Mark, when I've got more free time and am feeling perkier.

Anyway, it's your money, and you'll be hard pressed to find a higher quality chess book than this one. Whether that means you should purchase this book is up to you. I hope that even if you're not part of the primary intended audience for the book, you'll give it a look anyway for the reasons he suggested. As long as you don't get caught up in the attitude described in the previous paragraph, I think you can enjoy the book quite a lot.

Posted by Dennis Monokroussos on Sunday November 9, 2008 at 9:52pm. 2 Comments 0 Trackbacks

Book Review: Emanuel Lasker's St. Petersburg 1909

Emanuel Lasker, St. Petersburg 1909 (Russell Enterprises, 2008). 190pp; $19.95. Reviewed by Dennis Monokroussos.

The world chess champions, most notably Garry Kasparov, have all paid tribute to the historical figures of the game. But why? In one of Mark Dvoretsky’s books, an anecdote is told where a young player was told that she should study Alekhine’s games, to which she replied “Why? I’m not going to play him.” She could have added that his opening theory was at least half a century old, and then concluded “Quod erat demonstrandum.” Or to quote Henry Ford, “History is bunk.”

Most of us will disagree these sentiments, but what can we offer in response? Here are some possible replies. First, there are some remarkably beautiful games in the distant past, and whether they are of theoretical significance or not, their aesthetic value makes them worth the time. Second, many historical games have been noted for their instructional value. Generally speaking, the great players of the past were not inferior as strategists or in the endgame to their modern counterparts, and it’s hardly surprising that model games can be found in almost every era of chess history. In fact, because relative mismatches were more common then (top players would often participate in events with a combination of what we’d today call super-GMs and ordinary masters), there were more opportunities for such games than now, when the nearest thing to a mismatch features a 2790 taking on a “mere” 2730 pretender.

Further, old games can be valuable even for their openings, surprisingly enough. There are at least two reasons for this. The first one is perhaps the most obvious for our “gotcha” opening culture: old lines have been forgotten, and we can use them to trappy ends against our 21st century opponents. The subtler and probably better reason is that we come to understand contemporary openings better by seeing how they’ve come about. We take certain sequences of moves as obvious, as if they were written in GCO (God’s Chess Openings) after His day off. Not so: they are the product of trial and error, and of realizing that certain problems needed a solution. By thinking about the old games and then trying to bridge the gap, figuring out how we got from there to here, we’ll have a greater understanding of where we are today.

There are other reasons too, but this should suffice to provide at least a utilitarian justification for seeking out and studying (some) older games. But now we have a new problem: which ones? There are too many games for us to know all of them; we must be selective. This is the problem that arises when we think about the “21st Century Edition” of former world champion Emanuel Lasker’s book of the St. Petersburg tournament of 1909, written in that same year.

Here are the pluses in favor of purchasing the book. First, it was a very strong tournament. Lasker, then the world champion, and Akiba Rubinstein, one of the greatest players never to become champion (in his case, he was never even given a chance at the title), were both in terrific form, tying for first a whopping 3½ points ahead of the field. There were other very strong players, too: Carl Schlechter, who drew a title match with Lasker just a year later; the great attacker Rudolf Spielmann, Richard Teichmann, Milan Vidmar, Jacques Mieses, Amos Burn, chess author extraordinaire Savielly Tartakower and others. Tarrasch, Janowski, Marshall and Capablanca weren’t there – four big omissions, though Capablanca wasn’t really a known quantity at that time – but the rest of the world elite was participating.

Second, every game in the collection – all 175 of them – is annotated, and by none other than the world champion himself. Granted, the notes aren’t especially heavy. Lasker asserts in the preface that “The glossary [i.e. the notes – the ‘gloss’ on each game] was meant to be both necessary and sufficient. Nowhere will it be found lacking in supplying explanation needed, but it has no superfluities.” I think the notes are for the most part both helpful and accurate, especially by the standards of the day, but to claim that the notes offer necessary and sufficient explanation, and not a bit more, is of course silly. What the 1000 needs is not what the 1500 needs, likewise for the 2000 and so on, and the notes will not answer all the questions every player might ask. To even try to do that would require an enormous book. On the more manageable goal of offering explanations that will be helpful and useful to good club players and up, I think the book is a success. Likewise, the notes are substantially accurate, though a few minutes with your friendly chess engine will show that even a Lasker is fallible. That the notes are as accurate as they are is a tribute to Lasker, and the praise that Alexander Alekhine lavished upon those notes is well-deserved.

A third reason to buy this book is to encourage publishers to reissue other, even more interesting classics like New York 1924 (happily, I’ve been told that Russell Enterprises is releasing this one soon) and Nottingham 1936. Chess book buyers will get the books they deserve: if they buy garbage titles “explaining” how to win with the Latvian [step 1: find a weak opponent who never learns from his errors or bothers to look in a book or use a computer engine], or endlessly recycled tactics books of the form “777 Puzzles for Cultic Chess Clans”, publishers will pay authors to write such tripe; if they buy quality, then that’s what the publishers will offer.

Finally, let me offer a reason to get this edition rather than the earlier Dover edition. Normally, I’m not a fan of this process of taking a perfectly good book, changing the notation from descriptive to algebraic, doing some heavy-handed editing, adding a new preface and tripling the price. Anyone smart enough to read this blog is smart enough to learn and use descriptive notation fluently within a very few sessions. In this case, however, I think buying the newer product is warranted. True, the price is probably double what it would have been from Dover, if they still sold the book, but $19.95 is a very reasonable price, and, after all, Dover doesn’t still sell it. Further, the new edition is much more attractive than its predecessor. The typeface is much cleaner, and there’s a world of difference between the books’ diagrams. The new ones live up to the contemporary standard, while in the old ones you can barely tell the white pieces from the black ones.

I’ll close with one criticism. In the original edition, there are eight photographs. One is a group picture with all the players, while the other seven are very nice close-up shots. For no obvious reason, only the group picture has survived to the new book, and that is definitely a loss. I sincerely hope that Russell Enterprises does not repeat this amputation with their updated edition of New York 1924.

Overall though, a good book and a good buy, and I'm glad it's part of my library.

Posted by Dennis Monokroussos on Sunday November 9, 2008 at 2:36pm. 12 Comments 0 Trackbacks

Tuesday, November 4, 2008

A Great Tactics Book for Masters: Perfect Your Chess

It took me a little more than a year, on and off, to get through it, but Perfect Your Chess by elite GM Andrei Volokitin and his trainer, IM Vladimir Grabinsky, is one of the best tactics books I've ever used. I heartily recommend it to anyone over 2200. It's a book I intend to revisit in years to come.

Posted by Dennis Monokroussos on Tuesday November 4, 2008 at 1:38am. 3 Comments 0 Trackbacks

Saturday, November 1, 2008

Chess Opening Essentials: Mea Culpa!

Flipping through the latest issue of Chess Life, I ran across a page advertising books from New in Chess. Curious to see what might be new and if any of my reviews had been quote mined, it turns out that one had. The book is Chess Opening Essentials by Stefan Djuric, Dimitri Komarov and Claudio Pantaleoni, and the quote attributed to this blog was "Nearly indispensable".

I was horrified, but sure enough, looking it up on my blog, there were the offending words. In fairness, the full sentence was "Along with Andy Soltis's Pawn Structure Chess, I think it's one of the very few nearly indispensable works on the openings that belong in every amateur's library." As I saw it at the time, after a quick browsing, it was a book that was useful for players in the 1500-2000 range as a general reference work. I didn't mean that this was some sort of masterpiece of chess literature that everyone needed to have. Still, even with those limitations, my initial impression was a positive one, though I can hardly believe that I used the two word phrase I can't bring myself to repeat.

A little later, as mentioned in the cited post, I reviewed the book for Chess Today, and my review was far less positive. It's understandable that the New in Chess or Chess Life blurbers chose to ignore that review, but it's not so nice that they pretended it didn't exist and used the micro-review on the blog as if it hadn't been superseded.

So let me be as clear as possible: I do not recommend this book, with few exceptions. It's not the worst book ever written, it does have its good moments, and there are people who can benefit from it. Further, the book's concept is an excellent one, and I think this is what initially won me over. But it's far from indispensable, and literally a minute after finishing the Chess Today review the book went into my to-get-rid-of pile. I apologize to anyone who has bought the book based on that blurb or my earlier micro-review, and promise I will be far more careful in the future before offering such snap judgments. (Fortunately, this is the only example I can think of in the years I've blogged and done reviews for Chess Today where my impression of a book changed so strongly.)

Here is what I wrote for Chess Today; you can make up your own mind:

(show)

Posted by Dennis Monokroussos on Saturday November 1, 2008 at 3:42am. 4 Comments 0 Trackbacks

Saturday, October 25, 2008

Book Review: Chess Gems

Igor Sukhin, Chess Gems: 1,000 Combinations You Should Know (Boston: Mongoose Press, 2007). 335 pp. Reviewed by Dennis Monokroussos.

You’d think that people would have had enough of silly tactics books
I look around me and I see it isn’t so (Apologies to Paul McCartney)

It’s quite likely that the weight of the number of books written on chess tactics would be enough to crush and kill and a man of medium build – instantly. Even the collection of books I have on the subject might be enough to send him to the hospital; in fact, I’m a little tired of writing reviews of tactics books. Does anything more noble than the desire to make a buck (or pound, euro, ruble, etc.) justify this unending crime against treedom?

Most of the time, the answer, in my opinion, is a resounding “no”. Rehashing old material is terrible, as long as the original is still in print, while putting out new work solely because it’s new is also senseless, if it is intended for the same audience as the older work. The point is that if the student needs to grasp the ideas, the older work will generally succeed as well as the new material. Because he’s not familiar with the ideas that the old material covers, it’s as good as new to him. So why chop down more trees and jack up the price when no new benefit is conveyed by doing so?

Why? Because people buy, that’s why. If people would simply master the tactics books they have and then buy one that challenges them a level up, they would get the full benefit and not waste their money. But alas: hope springs eternal, and discipline often springs away like a scared rabbit. (Have I insulted everyone yet? Don’t forget the second sentence of the first full paragraph; I’m there with you, my brothers and sisters!) So let’s be more disciplined, get the most from the books we do have, and send our implicit statement of ridicule when greedy publishers and lazy authors try to make a quick buck by reinventing a perfectly good wheel.

And now I turn to the book under review, a collection of (about) 1,000 puzzles split up into various historical eras. There are fourteen historical chapters, going all the way back to the ancient era of Shatranj (an earlier version of the chess we play) and continuing up to the year 2000. Each chapter starts by recounting the chess history of that period, highlights several fine combinations from the era, and then concludes with a number of exercises for solving, a la the traditional puzzle book.

Now, it should go without saying that this is not a full-fledged book on chess history by any means. I read another review which complained a little that compared to Kasparov’s My Great Predecessors series, the history in Chess Gems was rather thin. This is true but highly irrelevant: Kasparov’s books comprise about 2000 large-size pages compared to Sukhin’s 300, and Sukhin’s book is explicitly centered on combinations; he doesn’t pretend to offer a historical tome. (Conversely, one could also attack Kasparov’s books as chess history, as there are large biographical volumes devoted to players he deals with in comparatively few pages of prose.)

On the other hand, while the Kasparov books win in the stories and deeply annotated games departments, Chess Gems lets us see a greater overall quantity of fragments, and top players outside the highest circle are included as well. In this respect, one can see the books as complementary rather than more or less thorough means to the same end.

Considering Chess Gems as a puzzle book, which is what it's primarily intended to be, it’s pretty good for club players under about 1800. It’s not a structured work – it doesn’t separate based on particular themes or difficulty. That makes it unsuitable for novices – the the structured approach is best for learning the ideas in the first place – but for those who do have the ideas the unstructured approach is superior.
So maybe it shouldn’t be one’s first tactics book, and if you’re seeking a Ph.D. in chess history, you don’t need this in your library. But for the average club player whose shelves aren’t groaning under the weight of other unused tactics books, it’s not a bad buy. The snippets of history covering the 20th century are pretty thin, but the chapters on previous centuries – the earlier the better – are surprisingly rich.

Let’s look at some problems from a couple of the early chapters, starting with the shatranj era. Shatranj, for those unfamiliar with chess’s “great predecessor”, had some differences with the modern game. Knights, rooks and kings moved the same way, but there was no double pawn move, the queen could only move diagonally and just a single square at a time, while bishops moved only and exactly two squares diagonally, jumping over pieces if it wanted to. There was no castling, and a game could be won by not only by checkmate but also by stalemating the opponent or taking all his pieces.

Many of us have seen this ancient problem. It’s a shatranj problem, but since in this position all of the pieces have the same capacities as in modern chess, it’s right at home for us, too.

Abu Naim Al-Khadim (9th century), White to move and win

This position still shows up from time to time in contemporary tactics books. However, it's about the only position from that time that does, probably because it doesn't include any distinctive shatranj features. But Sukhin has included ten more fragments, including these:

Al-Adli (9th century), White to move and win (Remember that Black's king isn't in check, as shatranj queens only move one square diagonally.)

Firduosi at Tahitala Manuscript (1501), Black to move and win

(The solutions to these three positions can be found at the end of this review.)

And here are three positions from the 18th century Syrian player Philip Stamma’s 1737 book (itself in part a puzzle book – you see how old this genre is?):

Stamma (1737), White to move and win

Stamma (1737), White to move and win

Finally, here's a position from the last chapter of the book. Since we've mentioned Kasparov several times already, let's give him the last word, chessically speaking:

Gelfand-Kasparov, Novgorod 1997; Black to move and win

(Solutions to the Stamma and Gelfand-Kasparov positions here.)

In sum, it’s a fun book; not necessary, but a decent tactics text for the club player, and an enjoyable way to catch up on some of the great combinations in chess history. (Those interested can find the book here and here, and no doubt elsewhere.)

Solutions to the shatranj puzzles: