Customer Reviews

The World's Great Chess Games

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

 

 

Seriously, I think this is one of those instant classics that all chess players should own!

This book is not your typical chess game collection. First of all the chapters are broken down into ages, for example chapter 1 is listed as "From Philidor to Morphy" and on to others such as "The Age of Lasker" and "The Age of Fisher", etc, etc. So this book covers quite a large area of chess history with a mini biography of each master which in my opinion is worth the price of this book.

The games are quite good, as you would guess and the annotations of the games are mostly short and in plain english, making it much more enjoyable to those less then masters.

The only negative thing that I could say is that the games are in descriptive format making it a little harder to play out the games but if your serious about chess this certainly won't stop you as it hasn't me. Hopefully this book will get updated at some point and fix this minor weakness of an otherwise great book.

The book is standard in size to most chess books and the font size is easy to read, the diagrams are a little hard on the eyes but just require that you study the diagrams a little more.

So there you have it. This book should be on your bookshelf or better yet next to your chess set and relive some of the best matches in chess history.

This book covers historical chess games since Philidor and up to Karpov. As such, it is a fantastic resource and you can expect to find here the gems of all players within this period. For each great player you have two-three of their best games; for less known players you get one game. There are biographical notes and comments. The analysis of games is good enough to point main variations, without delving into too much detail away from the main line of play. There is a fine balance here, of course: more detail could be provided on each player and their games, but then that would eliminate the possibility to include so many masters and games. I think this book strikes a great balance and should be in everyone's chess library - it was actually the first Dover chess book I purchased and then I got hooked on their lineup of classical chess literature.

Yes, the notation is descriptive, and if you are unfamiliar with it, you may make frequent mistakes initially. Don't let that deter you from enjoying this book though. Descriptive notation is easy to learn and with a bit of practice you'll read it as easy as algebraic.

If you are interested in a nice history of chess interspersed with beauty prize winning games, you will love this book.

This collection of games presents some difficulty. The games are rather sparsely annotated and it's often left to the reader to see the tactical and strategical rationales for the moves - hardly an easy task! Fine gives the most care to annotating the opening game, sensible for a player of his calibre, but of little practical use to the reader unless they specialize in the opening that is discussed.

The descriptive notation the book uses is frustrating. It has been not at all uncommon to move a piece to a wrong square and loose the thread of the game, errors that I wouldn't have made with algebraic notation.

It isn't that the book is bad for intermediate players, only that the time needed to digest the games is probably better spent with different material.

This is an ok book. The annotation is pretty good, though in some places it is a bit sparse. The main thing I don't like about it is that it is written in the old, descriptive notation and not updated to algebraic notation. Also, The diagrams are small and the moves crammed onto pages. This is a 3.5 book rounded up to 4. I'm not sure if you should buy this book.