Customer Reviews

How to Learn from Your Defeats (Macmillan Library of Chess)

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No wonder this book is not available - it is an attempt to show how we can learn from a defeat. All well and good but there is no such help here! What we have is a mishmash of games where Karpov lost and then achieved a victory against the same player. There is no relationship between openings or an attempt to take advantage of a player's style or idiosyncracies. We even have the ridiculous scenario of Karpov's particular win coming before the defeat. Might just have been named "I don't get mad I get even".

Karpov doesn't show you how to learn from your defeats; he doesn't even give you a clue. Instead his method is to present a lightly annotated (or unannotated) loss followed by a lightly annotated (or unannotated) revenge win over the same opponent. This procedure is repeated until the end of this dreadful volume.

The book is so utterly useless, I suspect it was ghost-written. It's hard to imagine a player of Karpov's caliber allowing his name to be associated with it; I mean, assuming it was ghost-written, how could such an incompetent ghost have the money to get Karpov to pretend to be the author?

This book is not worth the paper it was printed on. It appears to have been written in less time than it would take to read it.