Customer Reviews

Tarrasch's Best Games of Chess (Hardinge Simpole Chess Classics)

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The Amazon entry is mistaken: this 385-page collection of 183 of Tarrasch's best games is written by Fred Reinfeld. It is nice to have a Reinfeld book where he is focusing so intently on one player. His annotations are wonderful and typically, aimed at the improving player. The games are gems, as Tarrasch played in a classical style that priduces vast rewards to the interested student. The vast majority of these games are not in 300 Best Games, so this is an essential work to the fan of Tarrasch. A great Dover book.

Tarrasch was the dominant force in European chess in the early 1890's and his ability to win top level tournaments continued via his huge triumph at Vienna 1898 on to the "World Tournament Championship" of Ostend 1907. Tarrasch was rightly regarded as the teacher of generations of European and world Masters , hence his title Praeceptor Germaniae - the Professor from Germany. His victories in individual games included wins against Capablanca, Alekhine, Lasker, Nimzowitsch , Tchigorin , Pillsbury , Steinitz and more. Each of Tarrasch's games is a lesson in method and accuracy in itself, hence his wins are superb teaching models for the aspiring chess student. Fred Reinfeld was a renaissance man, with interests in politics, numismatics and chess. On the latter subject he was known as the man of 100 books, with scholarly essays on Capablanca, Nimzowitsch and - here- Tarrasch to his credit. As a master active on the US chess scene Reinfeld drew with Alekhine and defeated Reshevsky.

The much maligned Fred Reinfeld wrote a lot of books on chess up to his death in the 1960's and this I believe is his best book. Dover is known for publishing reprints of books, and was very active as a chess publisher up to about the mid 1970s. Their paperbacks tend to be very well put together and some have been updated with additional prefaces and games. While nearly all in descriptive notation (like this book) you get a lot of bang for your buck in collecting their books on famous players (Morphy, Steinitz, Lasker, Pillsbury, Capablanca, Alekhine, Marshall, Rubinstein, Nimzovich, Tartakover, Euwe, Keres, Reshevsky, Fine, Colle, Denker, Smyslov, Tal, etc). This was particularly useful for young players with not a lot of money and you could build a good chess library fairly quickly. This book, just shy of 400 pages, contains 183 fully annotated games covering Tarrasch's (b 1862 d 1934) career from 1883 to 1932. Reinfeld has based his annotations on those of Tarrasch himself and appear to be quite well balanced (unlike Tarrasch who tended to be very judgemental, but put a lot of thought into his annotations as he was keen to teach - Botvinnik copied Tarrasch's educational approach for example), while of course the 'theory' is a bit dated now (circa 1930's). This book was originally published by Chatto & Windus in 1947 and reprinted by Dover in 1960. As far as I know, this is the only complete book of Tarrasch's games available in English (his excellent "300 Games of Chess", translated in the 1990's, only went up to the early 1890's). It is a very good book, particularly if you want to understand Steinitz's theories simply explained and played by Tarrasch. Tarrasch was around the very top of players for a couple of decades to around 1910, and was highly respected by Bobby Fischer. There are some truly fantastic games in this book (e.g. match with Chigorin) and are very instructive, particularly for players at club level. The book has a short biography of Tarrasch and the games are presented in a number of sections: tournaments, matches, and other. This, like all my other Dover books, has lasted for over 40 years and is highly recommended if you can find a copy.

This is one of Reinfeld's better books, in my opinion. He annotates 183 of Tarrasch's best games, in a concise and instructive manner. This book is like having a fine chess teacher take you through many games of a master. The opening repertoire is rather limited, so you will not see many Sicilians, but this is a gret collection of master games from the Classical era. Most of these games are after the time period represented in Tarrasch's own "300 Games of Chess" so don't worry about this book being redundant. Since that book and Tarrasch's "The Game of Chess" are so valuable as instructive works, I consider this collection to be an essential part of my library, to see more well-annotated examples of Tarrasch's games.

I've been reading through the games of Tarrasch and commentaries about his games. I find I have an affinity and grasp of his concepts (which is not true of a large swath of high level historical players.) I was very anxious to get this book and ripped the box open with high anticipation.

Imagine my disappointment when they hadn't even bothered to translate this into algebraic notation! I cut my teeth on descriptive notation but it has been abandoned for good reason. I find it easy to sit in a coffee shop and read through a game in algebraic notation but not one in descriptive.

If you like or are at least comfortable with a book in descriptive notation then I really don't have any valuable comments as I sent the book back unread.