The Chess Mind

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.