The Chess Mind

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 2:40am. 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 3:20am. 2 Comments 0 Trackbacks

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 Monday November 10, 2008 at 12:41am. 0 Comments 0 Trackbacks

Sunday, November 9, 2008

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 10:52pm. 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 3:36pm. 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 2:38am. 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 4:42am. 4 Comments 0 Trackbacks

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