New in Chess 02/2020

Culte de la personnalité pas mort... Staline, Mao Dzedong, Enver Hoxha et Kim Il-Sung doivent frétiller d'envie dans leurs tombes. Blague à part, s'il est évident que Kasparov est le plus grand joueur de sa génération (le titre de """"plus grand joueur de to

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Books on how to improve your results over the board have been written before but in these changing times when chess has propelled onto the public consciousness, an update is badly needed. Grandmaster Daniel Gormally uses his 25+ years of experience to take the readers through the fires of the tournament cauldron, while illustrating some of his battles with the best players in England.
Along the way he tackles how to approach online play, an increasingly important issue as this form of chess has increased in popularity. Do you need a coach ? Will streamers relly help you to improve ? And should you turn off your computer ? Gormally emphasizes the importance of independent analysis in enabling the player to make progress and explains how he himself suffered in his results due to an over-reliance in chess engines.
And then there is the nitty gritty of tournament play itself. Gormally grapples with subjects that aren't covered in normal tournament books, from what hotels you should choose, to what kind of diet you need to follow, while also concluding that he lacks the awesome physical fitness of the Norwegian chess god Magnus Carlsen.
It all culminates in an explosive Hastings diary, where the author uses his acerbic wit to pull apart the vagaries of preparing for international competition in an account that verges on comic-tragic. 348 pages

This book is dedicated to the match-tournament of 1948, which gave rise to the first Soviet World Champion - Mikhail Botvinnik. The main content of the book is the detailed analysis of the fifty games played in this event. Detailed commentary to the games has been written for a very wide circle of qualified chessplayers, in which connection particular attention has been paid to the accessibility of the presentation and the appearance in the games of important turning points. The criticism of the mistakes committed by the participants could seem at times to be overly severe, but represents the fruits of painstaking analysis and should bring benefit to chessplayers who wish to draw the necessary theoretical and practical conclusions from the games of the match-tournament.It is very difficult, and often impossible, to claim absolute accuracy in chess analysis, but at any rate, I have endeavoured to fulfil my work with the maximum thoroughness.  257 pages Hardcover

Translator’s Foreword

It is exactly 75 years since one of the most significant events in chess history – the 1948 Match-Tournament for the World Chess Championship – took place in The Hague and Moscow. To mark this anniversary, my colleagues at Chess Informant have agreed to publish a new English translation of Paul Keres’ book on the tournament.

The original work has been extended to include historical context to the event – in this case, excerpts from the contemporary Soviet chess press and from the memoirs of Mikhail Botvinnik. Keres’ book on the event was first published in his native Estonian language in 1949. A year later it appeared in Russian translation and it came to be regarded as one of the best books on chess ever written. For instance, the likes of Garry Kasparov and Boris Gelfand are both on record as listing it among their favourites.

In this book, Keres’ annotations to the games have been faithfully reproduced. They have not been corrected by computer analysis; instead, they have been supplemented in some cases by the analysis of other masters – generally with that of the other players. In addition, historical context has occasionally been added in those cases where Keres’ assessments of certain openings have been overturned, or at least challenged, by many decades of tournament practice.

It has been a considerable pleasure to work on this project. Keres, as well as being an outstanding grandmaster, was also a superb analyst and annotator. His notes to the games represent a fine blend of general considerations and concrete variations; unlike in many books published today, the latter are never allowed to dominate. It is my sincere hope that the combination of these notes with the additional historical context will succeed in bringing Keres’ work to a new audience, and that this book will be a valuable addition to the libraries of chess enthusiasts of all abilities

Douglas Griffin