Customer Reviews

My Fifty Years of Chess

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After playing over some Marshall games in other collections where players like Capablanca and Lasker just ran roughshod over him, I was not all that interested in checking him or his games out. I am glad I did! This was a fun, and exciting book of games to play through. Marshall's annotations are pretty good but NOT great, especially from an educational standpoint. Nevertheless I really got a lot out of this book. The games are super fun and really do open your eyes to some interesting attacking and defensive tactics! (Plus Marshall is a better positional player then he is given credit for and there is a WIDE variety of openings represented here. I particularly enjoyed watching Marshall go all hyper-modern and beat Nimzowitsch!) Highly recommended!!

Frank Marshall's watchwords were brilliancy and attack! For decades he was the leading USA grandmaster and he succeeded in scalping most of the world's elite during that time. Noted as a successful tournament rather than match player, Marshall's hit and run tactics will repay careful study by those who consider entering the hurly burly of tournament chess. For those content to sit by the fireside and play through an entertaining grandmaster game hours of enjoyment are to be derived from Marshall's blitz demolition of his opponents' carefully constructed strategic artifices. As Lasker once said of Dr Tarrasch "if chess were made of glass Tarrasch would be the greatest of us all." Marshall was the iconoclast who revelled in proving again and again that the palaces of crystal could be spectacularly shattered by a well timed blow.
Frank Marshall - many times US champion,grandmaster and conqueror of Lasker, Capablanca, Rubinstein and virtually all the greats of his day - was the heir to Morphy and Pillsbury and the forerunner of Fine, Reshevsky and Fischer. Under his leadership the USA also won the gold medals in the chess olympiad. Marshall's style was direct, almost brutal, but easy to understand and supremely effective -if you want to learn attacking techniques then the games of Frank Marshall are ideal models.

the author was usa champion for many years and collected the scalps of the greats including lasker, capablanca ,nimzowitsch, rubinstein, schlechter and tarrasch. sometimes marshall was strategically outplayed but he was always ready with a tactical riposte which cd bowl his opponent over. a highly enjoyable book and the games are explained in a jovial fireside manner.