Customer Reviews

San Antonio, 1972: Church's Fried Chicken, Inc. First International Chess Tournament

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I am generally reluctant to spend $26.00 for a chess book, but sponsor Bill Church went all out to attract some of the world's best players at the time - Petrosian, Karpov, Portisch, Larsen and Gligoric among them - in order to promote chess in America.

This book is not worthy of the tournament. Annotations are sparse (or nonexistent) and most are by Levy and Bent Larsen.

A good tournament book will have a summary of each round with details of the most important games and comments by the players. Not in this book. There is some biographical material on each player. There are also two articles, one offering lame comments on directing the tournament by TD George Koltanowski, and the other consisting of the observations of a reporter covering her first chess tournament.

And for $26.00 I expect a lot of at the board photographs and some interviews with the top players. The only pictures were small head shots of the players in the corner of their bios.

I was looking forward to a good read to go along with the games but I could have done just as well by pulling the games from a Chess Informant database.