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).
(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).