To make a reckoning: How Good Is Your Chess? is an enjoyable and challenging collection of chess puzzles. The solutions are generally accurate and Evans’ comments are often instructive. Working through the book and making at stab at solving the positions will undoubtedly help you improve as a chess player.
Category: Chess books
A review of Chess Informant 99 by Zdenko Krnic (ed)
A review of Bob Wade: Tribute to a Chess Master
Bob Wade: Tribute to a Chess Master is, first and foremost, a games collection. It collects together just under 250 of Bob Wade’s games, played between 1945 and 2006. There are 27 or 28 (see below) annotated games, with about a third annotated by Wade himself (and included among this number is a hard-fought draw with Bobby Fischer).
A review of The Life & Games of Akiva Rubinstein by John Donaldson and Nikolay Minev
Reviewed by Paul Kane John Donaldson and Nikolay Minev The Life & Games of Akiva Rubinstein, Volume 1: Uncrowned King by John Donaldson and Nikolay Minev Second Edition, Revised and Enlarged Russell Enterprises May 2007, ISBN-13: 978-1888690293, 402 pages The…
A review of Secrets of Opening Surprises, Volume 6 by Jeroen Bosch (editor)
Secrets of Opening Surprises, Volume 6 is, without a doubt, an excellent resource for replenishing and renewing your opening repertoire. If you succumb to temptation, the opening ideas contained in this book will set intriguing and testing challenges for your opponent – and for yourself too! As well as offering a little illicit excitement along the way …
A review of Knight on the Left: 1.Nc3 by Harald Keilhack
This is very much a superior opening book. It is intellectually stimulating, a rare virtue, and it presents a thorough survey of 1.Nc3, demonstrating that it gives realistic prospects of a White advantage. A comprehensive list of research materials used by the author – including books, periodicals, databases and internet sources (web pages and newsgroups) – rounds off the book nicely.
A review of Chess Informant 97
Playing over top-quality games such as these, and studying the accompanying notes, provides the best possible grounding for finding out what modern chess is about, whether in the area of attack, defense or positional play. One can see what the best contemporary players are doing, acquire a good appreciation of their various styles and keep up to date with current opening theory as well.
A review of Reuben Fine by Aidan Woodger
Although the games are, naturally, the meat of the book, Woodger also finds space to include an immense amount of other interesting information: tables of all Fine’s tournament and match results; a brief biography; an annotated bibliography of all of Fine’s writings on chess; myriad appreciations of his play from the great and the good; a précis of a paper on blindfold chess (i.e. chess played without sight of the board and pieces) that Fine published in an academic journal in 1965; and much else besides.
A review of Chess Facts and Fables by Edward Winter
There are many diagrams of chess positions, and many photographs and line drawings of famous and little-known players, and these add to the value of the book. For anyone with an interest in chess history, this volume is a wonderful treasure trove. It is perfect for browsing, whether one happens to be in one’s library or on one’s lavatory.
A review of Russians Versus Fischer by Dmitry Plisetsky and Sergey Voronkov
What is so extraordinary about Russians Versus Fischer, though, is the way in which it uses a myriad of till-now confidential documents from the archives of the USSR Chess Federation and the Soviet Sports Committee, many of them dating from the late 1960s to the early 1970s, to tell the story of Fischer’s rise from a Soviet perspective; i.e. from the viewpoint of those who had most to lose from it.