Customer Reviews

How Karpov Wins: Second, Enlarged Edition (Dover Chess)

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I'm a mixed fan of Mednis (I don't like his repertoire books, like "From the opening to the endgame," but his endgame books are superb), but this is an exceptional book. He breaks down the elements of Karpov's style both statistically and analytically, and does a good job of showing Karpov's approach to the game. Karpov's style may not appeal to everyone (not terribly exciting), but he always plays to win and is notoriously difficult to beat. Mednis shows the openings he plays, the middlegames he prefers, and his preference for clear endgames over advantageous middlegames. Most useful for ELO 1600+ players.

This book is a must have for EVERY chessplayer.This book is very instructive.You will learn a lot from this book about chess strategy and positional play.The author Edmar Mednis once a strong chessplayer and with a victory against Bobby Fischer himself has done a great job on explaining the way Karpov plays. I remember Kramnik when asked how many chessbooks he had read . Kramnik said that he had not read that many books. But he said that he had a book with Karpovs games which he studied in depth.

If you want to understand Karpovs game you cant be without this book.Many people rate books with 5 points without hesitation but this book is a REAL 5 pointer.I have many chessbooks and this one is on the absolute top.It's just fantastic to see Karpov slowly squeeze and finally destroy his helpless opponents.
To me it looks like an anacondas victory over his helpless victims.The opponents often get desperat.

The author annotates with many words.You will get very much from every game.You can use the knowledge you get from this book on your opponents!

SPECIALLY RECOMMENDED

Buy it now !!

Mednis' books are usually pretty good, and this is one of his best. The annotations are insightful with regard to Karpov's style of play, and instructive to the intermediate player. Descriptive notation. Typical Dover high quality paperback. Probably one of my top 10 "desert island" books.

You can easily get opening repertoire books [try Batsford due to their excellent track record] on the Ruy Lopez, Taminov Sicilian, Queens Gambit Declined (for black)- these are Karpov's main opening and defensive weapons in this text, Buy a program that builds tactical motifs and endgame motifs (most of us all need this, unless were GM / IM), and finally this book will show us how to work them all together as a cohesive unit. And you should have a clear path to mastery, inspired by Karpov. All you have to do now is just devote whatever precious time you have left for chess into this system. I've improved A LOT (went from 1600 level to near-Expert) and still haven't scratced the surface yet. The reason I have it 4 stars instead of 5 was that, I don't mind the descriptive notation and Edmar Mednis's analysis which is very helpful and clear. However, what I would like to see in the NEXT edition is algebreic notation and having Anatoly Karpov himself throw in some of his own comments on the book. Don't discount the comments of the late Mednis, but hearing from THE MAN himself about his own chess thoughts and what he is trying to accomplish would be ideal. I highly reccomend this title! Definitely on my stranded island list.

Full Packed book on Karpov! It has statistics on Karpov's chess records during the 1970's era, which includes favorite openings used, wins / losses / draws against IM's and GM's, etc.

The work done by Mednis here is more for the "easy reading" type of chess player, unlike Botvinnik or Kotov's books which are jam-packed with variations and analysis and more analysis. The reader is to be entertained. Mednis often praises Karpov here when Anatoly makes those "multi-purpose" moves. Karpov has a knack of making such moves. Learn some of those tricks from this book.

I am a 1800 - 2000 rated player, and regularly play in the school-university tournaments. I used the material in this book (the openings Karpov plays, the karpov Middlegame Technique, the 'How -to-win-ala-Karpov' commandments that Mednis gave) to capture the gold medal in the year-round tournament.

Before reading this book I thought Karpov was a kind of "Chess Beast". But now I know he became great 'cause of his patience and ability to read correctly the position without taking unnecessary risks. I was astonished to see the number of games he won in quite balanced positions because his adversaries were not able to keep the balance and let the draw run away.
The comments of Mr.Mednis are generous and easy to grasp.

AK wins with his usual smooth winning technique, and this book dissects Karpov's style for the reader to have a very good "feel" for Karpov's staggering style.

Just like the title this is a most have for chess lovers. Im enjoying every game . I think this is not for analisys freeks. Its a sensitive and nice recount of the psychological factors and practicals factors of Karpov strategies. I think it is a most enjoyable book and sure it is improving in my understanding of the game

This book covers one hundered of Karpov's games up to 1972. The games are outdated but the book has got excellent annotations and reasoning behind Karpov's moves. It shows how Karpov uses his technique to grind out a win. It is a good example of how to win from a winning position. Another similar book is Turning Advantage into Victory which shows how to use technique to win a won game. Both books are best read side by side. You can learn to improve your technique by playing through these games and see how GM Karpov wins in effortless fashion.

I would have given this book three stars, except that it's selling for only (...) on Amazon.com, which is a pretty terrific price for a book that features 100 of Karpov's games. Unfortunately, these are not his best games; they are just his wins. And how does Karpov win? Mostly by exploiting tiny endgame advantages, often in games wherein he passed up advantageous middlegames for dead-even endings.
Although his wins are mostly pretty boring, they have considerable instructional value. Studying the games of Karpov is comparable to eating oatmeal or cream of wheat, whereas the games of Shirov and Kasparov are more comparable to steak or chocolate cake. The attacking geniuses are more fun, but, for me at least, it's easier to understand and emulate the styles of Karpov and Capablanca than that of Tal or Alekhine. Playing solid, positional chess doesn't win a lot of brilliancy prizes, but most people who sacrifice pieces and try to calculate eight moves deep just wind up looking like fools most of the time.
I give author Mednis a mixed review. He knows what's going on in the games better than most of his readers, but as Grandmasters go, he's not much of a tactician. Besides missing a lot of tactics, he has an annoying habit of calling a move "the losing move" that is anything but that. For example, in a game between Karpov and Spassky that went 1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 g6, Mednis calls Black's second move the losing move simply because the King's Indian isn't part of Spassky's normal repertoire. But half the fun of this book is finding baloney like that, so despite what I just said, I strongly recommend the book anyway.