Coffee Table Chess

Chess Masterpieces
One Thousand Years of Extraordinary Chess Sets

Published in 2010, this is the most gorgeous of the books reviewed here, as well as the largest in terms of physical size and page count. The paper is thick and glossy, the quality of the photography excellent.

The book begins with the obligatory historical overview of the game, followed by a chapter on materials and another (the longest) entitled "War as a Theme."

Most of the remaining chapters are organized geographically (France, Germany, Russia, the Far East, etc.). The last two chapters show sets from the 20th and the 21st century. The text for the most part devotes itself to pointing out details about the sets that the reader might overlook.

Something that becomes clear as one pages through the book is that photographing chess sets is not as straight forward as it might seem. A single photo cannot provide both front and back views, while photographing pieces in the opening position will result in some being obscured by others. Thus sets in the book are posed in a variety of ways in order to do them justice.

Vice vs Virtue

Since most of the sets are owned by the author, George Dean, it is a small indulgence on his part to include one that he himself created out of wooden spools and drawerpulls. Charming, yes, but hardly a masterpiece.

That word causes more trouble in the final chapter, where one might wonder if enough time has passed for anything created since the year 2000 to be deemed a masterpiece -- especially if it lacks the sort of physical craftsmanship that make others in the book so appealing.

Chess Masterpieces is the most expensive of the books listed here, but worth it if you're at all fascinated by the physical side of the game. You can get a peek at some of the sets at World Chess Hall of Fame website -- go to Exhibitions/Exhibition Archive/2012. The site includes downloadable highlights in PDF form of the Dr. George and Vivian Dean Collection, as well as an audio tour.

10 x 12 in, 272 pp

The Art of Chess

Physically the smallest of the books discussed here, but also the most affordable, The Art of Chess by Colleen Schafroth was published in 2002 and takes a slightly broader approach than Chess Masterpieces.

The earlier chapters chart the development of the game, after which the focus is on sets and boards. The layouts are beautifully done with no two-page spread that does not have at least one full-colour illustration. The only flaw (and it is a relatively minor one) is that a few of the photos are a little fuzzy, perhaps being blown up a little larger than is advisable.

Greek, 20th century, bronze

The chapter titles are:

• Origins of the Game
• The First Golden Age of Chess
• The Establishment of the Game in Europe
• Modelling the Universe
• Speeding Up the Game
• Chess in the Industrial Age
• The Twentieth Century and Beyond

According to the duskjacket's back flap, "a large part of the illustrations" in the book come from the permanent collection of chess sets at the Maryhill Museum of Art in Washington. "The collection had its origins in an exhibition held at the museum in 1957," and at present includes "over 300 sets dating from the 17th century" and "features naturalistic and abstract forms from cultures around the world."

9.5 x 9.5 in, 176 pp

Chess: A Celebration of 2000 Years

The oldest of the three books, and the one that takes the broadest approach, covering all aspects of the game, not just sets.

The illustrations are drawn from a wider source than the other books mentioned here, and include photos of chess luminaries as well as ordinary players, tournaments, outdoor games, living chess, even a game played in a swimming pool. Many of these are in B&W.

Chapters are devoted to the history and culture of the game, the board, versions of the game in other countries, discussions of the attractions and complexities of the game, a few short but famous games, and finally an overview of important players.

A collection of Knights

The chapter I enjoyed most was that on the sets themselves. Pieces from different sets are grouped together in a single spread, often across two pages -- one for kings, one for queens, and so on. It's an engaging approach, highlighting the assortment of styles and materials in a revealing and eye-catching way.

Overall it's an enjoyable read from start to finish, marred only by minor typos scattered throughout, for example the quotation from Bobby Fischer, "Chess is live."

The book is translated from the German, a collaboration by Finkenzeller, Ziehr, and Buhrer, and published in Canada in 1989 by the sadly departed Key Porter Books. Physically it is only slightly smaller than Chess Masterpieces.

9.5 x 12 in, 208 pp

Zugzwang

Good chess novels are hard to come by, but this is one of the better ones, set in St. Petersburg in 1914, three years prior to the Russian revolution. Lining up against each other are the Bolsheviks, of course, and the Tsar backed by his secret police, the Okhrana.

At the same time a prestigious chess tournament is being held, in which many of the world's strongest players are competing, including Lasker, Capablanca, Tarrasch, Blackburne, Nimzowitch. The tournament was real, but departing from historical fact is the inclusion of a fictional GM named Rozental (though he is based on Rubinstein). He is favoured to win.

In a third narrative strand, the main character, Dr. Otto Spethmann, is a psychoanalyst treating not only Rozental, but also Petrov, the de facto leader of the Bolsheviks with Lenin in exile, and a woman named Anna, with whom Spethmann falls in love. Thus we have the intricacies of chess mirrored by the intricacies of revolution, psychoanalysis, and love -- an impressive and ambitious conceit.

Finally, to top it all off, Spethmann is playing a correspondence game against his friend, a gifted violinist named Kopelzon. Spethmann has never beaten him, but this time he feels he has a good chance. As the book opens, they have reached a rook and pawn endgame. Spethmann has just played Rxg4 -- and the body of a liberal newspaper editor has been retrieved from a canal.

Over the course of the novel, the progress of this game is followed by means of 12 diagrams.

"Psychoanalysis is like panning for gold"

Rozental is on the verge of a mental breakdown and has been brought to Spethmann by Kopelzon. The latter is very keen that Rozental win the tournament, for both are Polish Jews, and with Poland occupied and partitioned by Russia, a victory by Rozental would be a symbolic victory against their country's oppressors. Soon after Spethmann's first session with the Rozental, two thugs invade his office and steal the GM's file.

Petrov is a champion of the city’s poor and an electrifying speaker, but he is also exhausted and depressed. His life is hellish and the party a snakepit, especially since its penetration by a traitor, codenamed King, who has been betraying comrades. He visits Spethmann under the alias of Grischuk, and tells Spethmann, "I want you to make my lives possible."

Anna is suffering from nightmares, which appear to be related to a traumatic event that happened when, as a young girl, she visited Kazan with her father, Zinnurov, from whom she is now estranged. Zinnurov, nicknamed the Mountain, is an influential industrialist and anti-Bolshevik. He warns Spethmann that his daughter is erratic and cannot be trusted to speak the truth. Their stories about events in Kazan do not match.

"A series of ingenious slayings"

That is how Spethmann describes the chess tournament. They are matched by actual slayings beginning with the newspaper editor and quickly followed by that of a young man, whose body is found with Spethmann’s card in his pocket. Inspector Lychev of the St. Petersburg police believes Spethmann’s 17-year-old daughter, Catherine, is somehow involved.

Bodies continue to pile up as Bolsheviks clash with the secret police. A notorious Polish terrorist is on the loose and a plot to assassinate the Tsar is uncovered. Nothing can be taken at face value. Everyone has a secret, allegiances shift, complications spring up, lies and spies proliferate. The dizzying complexities suggest the many possible lines in a chess match. Spethmann observes:

…I tried to be as logical about Lychev’s story as about the variations in a chess game. In chess it is easy to be panicked by a complicated position and the aggressive manoeuvring of an opponent. What is needed always is a cool eye and a clear head. Calculate. Calculate concrete variations. What do I do if my opponent does this? What do I do after that?

Spethmann's cool approach to life is turned upside-down when he is drawn into a torrid affair, thrown into jail, shot at, blown up, and finally has to flee the country. The dilemma he faces cannot be won. He, like Russia itself, is in zugzwang.

Links

Book Trailer
Author interview on Chessbase
Reviews

The Inner Game

This account of the 1993 world championship match between Kasparov and British challenger, Nigel Short, makes a great companion to Fred Waitzkin’s Mortal Games, which describes the 1990 match between Kasparov and Karpov. Where Waitzkin writes as an insider to the Kasparov camp, this book comes from the opponent's side.

It begins with Short’s qualifying victories against Gelfand, Karpov, and Timman, then describes in intimate detail each of the 20 games of the match with Kasparov. Though the champion retained his title with a decisive score of 12½ to 7½, the contest was far from dull. “Unlike almost all previous world championship matches, every game had been fought, as Kasparov himself put it, ‘to the last pawn.’”

Some highlights:

Game 1 – Short, ahead by a pawn, refused the offer of a draw mere seconds before running out of time.

Game 2 – Short playing white ”let slip the one clear winning opportunity...and the position ebbed away toward a draw.” Short said afterward, “I can tell you, he was frightened. When I doubled my rooks against his king I smelt it.”

Game 3 – “Its climactic moments were of a complexity and ferocity that reduced the spectators...to gasps of astonishment.”

Game 4 – Short unveiled “an unexploded bomb from Kavalek’s work as Bobby Fischer’s coach in the 1972 match against Spassky.” For the second time he refused a draw and lost the game.

Game 5 – “Short, armed with a brilliant new concept in the Nimzovitsch defence, had achieved a draw using only twelve minutes, while Kasparov had sweated at the board for one and a half hours.”

Game 6 – Early in the game Short played a move so surprising that American champion Patrick Wolff literally fell off his chair. Kasparov appeared to have the advantage but had eventually bluffed his way out of defeat to a draw. “The audience burst into thunderous applause.”

Game 8 - After an “improbably violent sequence of moves” Short had a winning position but was pressed for time and Kasparov was able to gain a draw by perpetual check. “A standing ovation.”

Game 10 – Short dug himself out of a hole with a queen sacrifice, then missed the win because once again he was pressed for time and had to offer a draw. From this point on (i.e. the last 11 games of the match) Short and Kasparov were exactly even with one win and nine draws each.

Game 14 – Kasparov again bluffed his way to a draw. “I had suffered enough in this game. It was very unpleasant for me. I was losing at one point. A draw is not a bad result.”

Game 16 – Kasparov’s “pawn structure looked as though it had contracted dry rot.” Short’s only win of the match.

Game 17 – Short employed a “very well-camouflaged trick, resting on a spectacular geometric sequence of moves which was particularly hard for the human eye to anticipate, but, once seen, was completely obvious, and, somehow, very funny.” Short refused Kasparov’s offer of a draw and played on for another hour “while I still had some chances to torture him.”

The Inner Game

The book's title refers to the psychological aspect of chess which, in a world championship match, is 90% of the game according to one GM quoted in the book. Here's an example:

Kasparov...developed the intimidating stare into something approaching an art form. His technique differs from that of his Soviet predecessors. While Tal specialized in straightforward aggression, and Karpov in "look no hands" brain-scans, Kasparov's gaze is designed to humiliate. The best example, or rather the worst, that I actually witnessed was during the eleventh game of his 1987 world championship match against old snake-eyes himself, Anatoly Karpov. Karpov fell for a sinister little one-move trap which allowed Kasparov to turn a terrible position into a winning one. When Karpov fell into it, Kasparov could have flashed out his prepared winning reply. But he did not. Instead he gazed across the board with undisguised contempt. At that moment Karpov must have realized what he had done: his right hand, which was writing down his own last move, suddenly froze in mid-hieroglyphic. Kasparov, savouring the moment, slowly lifted his own right hand from the table, and with a sweeping gesture, like a matador putting on a cape, played the killing reply. He then sat and stared at Karpov, while clapping his now free right hand over his mouth, as if to stifle a giggle.

Unfortunately for Kasparov such tactics would not be available to him a few years later in his match against a steelier opponent, Deep Blue.

Mortal Games

The Turbulent Genius of Garry Kasparov

The author of Searching for Bobby Fischer pals around with Kasparov during his world championship match in 1990, and provides an intimate portrait of him at age 27: charming, intense, moody, flamboyant, abrasive, haughty, impatient, intimidating, and filled with prodigious energy.

Kasparov's opponent was Anatoly Karpov, whom he made no secret of his dislike, calling him "a creature of darkness" due to his close ties with the KGB and the communist party. Kasparov had been traumatized by the massacre of Armenians in his home town of Baku earlier that year, and from which he had barely escaped with his life. He claimed the pogrom was instigated by the KGB with the full knowledge of Gorbachev.

The 24-game match began in New York and ended in Lyon. There are no accompanying diagrams, only brief but exciting accounts of the games. The author is more interested in the human side of the struggle, focusing on personalities. Of Kasparov he writes:

He is beautiful when he plays, a wild creature. His body is tense, his face taut, punishing, at times fierce, as if he is about to physically attack. I have seen top grandmasters wither from his fury, becoming dishevelled, alarmed...

Both he and Karpov played brilliantly at times, sometimes arriving at positions so complex that other GMs were unable to say who had the advantage.

"These games are like Hitchcock mysteries," said Mikhail Tal, sitting in the pressroom. "No one knows what will happen next." ... In his prime he had been known as a player able to impose complications that his opponent simply could not figure out in the allotted time, but now Tal made it clear that the depth and abstraction of games 3 and 4 were beyond anything he had ever seen before in championship play. "But for all the complications, at times these games remind me of ice hockey," he said, "fast, hard, brutal."

Yet both players also committed blunders, and after 15 games each had won only a single game. Karpov was the underdog, and Kasparov's popularity had waned recently.

A large majority of the players favored Karpov in the match, and several days before, when he had won game 17, a group of them stood and cheered. In 1984, Karpov had been much hated in the chess world, but grandmasters in Lyon were calling the new Karpov "a regular guy" and "a gentleman," claiming that when you got to know him. "he was very kind."

Still, not everyone was satisfied with the course that some games took, and during game 18 Boris Spassky put on a comical show for reporters:

...he was pompous, theatrical, funny. He imitated the high nasal voice of Karpov. Mimicking Kasparov, he lumbered around like a gorilla on speed. He grabbed his nose with his hand to signal that there was something rotten about how Karpov and Kasparov were playing, but teasingly refused to elaborate. Then he crossed his fingers to signal that the game would be a draw. "They do not want to fight." His melodic voice dripped with disgust.

When Kasparov finally came away with a one-point victory, he sold the trophy he won in order to fund a relief program for Armenian refugees.

One of the most moving stories in the book is that of a reporter named Manny Topol. His father had walked out of Poland during the lead-up to WWII and survived by hustling chess for money. Eventually he wound up in America but was never able to get his son interested in the game. Now, covering this match, Manny finally saw its beauty and uttered one of the most poignant lines I have ever heard:

"Oh, what I wouldn't give to have one more chess game with my father."

Bobby Fischer Goes to War

The True Story of How the Soviets Lost the Most Extraordinary Chess Match of All Time

The "Match of the Century" has already been the subject of many books, but this one has benefited by coming out more than 30 years after the event.

Thanks to the ending of the Cold War, the authors had access to sources of information formerly unavailable. They spoke to many of the key people involved (the main exception, of course, being Fischer himself), and have put together this compulsively readable account.

In 1972 the match caught the imagination of people in the West because it was seen as a Cold War battle enacted over a chessboard, with a lone American taking on the seemingly invincible Soviet chess collective.

The authors have a different view: "Far from being a simple ideological confrontation, the championship was played out on many levels, of which the chess itself was only one." Thus their focus is more on what happened away from the board. They begin by describing the two opponents: Fischer the "enfant terrible of chess," and Spassky something of a maverick himself, a patriotic Russian who felt little allegiance to the Soviet Union. He was not a party member, and once raised hackles by asking:

"Did Comrade Lenin suffer from syphilis?"

The authors explain how Fischer was able to dictate the terms of the match in a way that had never happened before. The event almost never took place because he demanded an unprecedented amount of money. British businessman Jim Slater came to the rescue by kicking in an additional $125,000. That got Fischer to Reykjavik, but the barrage of demands continued, some of them quite ridiculous:

The legs of the $1200 custom-built mahogany table should be shortened, the sumptuous chessboard changed, the front rows of seats removed, the camera towers pushed right back to the point where filming would be nigh impracticable, the lighting brighter –- no, less bright, no, brighter than that.

Opposing him was the likeable Spassky, who had never been beaten by Fischer, and who was perhaps more accommodating than he should have been. The cumulative effect of Fischer’s tantrums and ultimatums wore down the champion even before the match began. He also undermined his own efforts by quarrelling with his handlers and insisting on putting together his own team. He did not prepare as hard as he could have, and was surprised by Fischer's use of atypical openings, like the English.

When Spassky fell behind, the Soviets expressed concern that the Americans were using “non-sporting” means to gain an advantage – telepathy, chemicals, parapsychology, etc. Fischer’s chair was x-rayed, revealing a strange u-shaped tube inside it, which did not show up on a second x-ray. Was it a diabolical device? Or was it planted then removed by the KGB?

"I'm crushing him with brute force. Haaaaaa!"

Fischer is reported to have said this during game 3, which he won -- the first time he had ever beaten Spassky. In the end he won 7 games to Spassky's 3 (one of which Fischer forfeited by not showing up). The rest were draws, though "far from being dull, lazy games, several of these had been desperate, protracted bare-knuckle brawls, exciting if not always pretty."

The final score was 12.5 - 8.5 after 21 games. Fischer earned over $150,000, while Spassky took home $93,750, making him a wealthy man in the USSR.

Fischer never defended his title despite lucrative tournament offers. When he was due to meet Karpov, the winner of the next Candidates tournament, he issued a list of 179 demands. When FIDE refused to meet them all, he resigned his title. Many observers believed he was frightened of the chessboard. After winning the championship, he had nothing left to achieve and descended into "an abyss of unreality."

A few final quotes:

Reykjavik changed chess itself. Spassky went to Reykjavik to celebrate chess. Fischer went to fight. There never has been an era in modern chess during which one player [Fischer] has so overshadowed all others.

A movie based on the book is in development.

The Human Comedy of Chess

A Grandmaster's Chronicles

I learned the game as a child from my grandfather, who played postal chess. He bought me a small book suitable for my age, but I was more captivated by the names of the openings than the openings themselves, and to this day it is the lore of the game holds my greatest interest.

The Human Comedy of Chess is a work exactly suited to my taste. It’s a collection of articles written in the 1990s by Dutch GM Hans Ree and splendidly translated by Willem Tissot and Maureen Peeck.

It contains 56 articles with an average length of just around five pages and bearing titles such as:

Chess with the KGB
Karpov's Revenge
Khan of Kalmykia
What is Beautiful?
Heroic Tales
The Chess Murder
Adjourned Games

There are pieces on the history of chess, and on familiar names such as Reshevsky, Tal, Botvinnick, Marshall, Keres, Nimzowitsch, Koltanowski, Duchamp. Scattered throughout are a number of games with brief but colourful annotations. Particularly entertaining is Ree's account of the matches between Karpov and Anand, Short and Timman, and Short and Kasparov.

The writing is smooth, witty, engaging, with pungent observations on nearly every page. A sampling:

Today's top chess: rather like the headhunting frenzy of axe-wielding savages Tal: doctors had accidentally removed not a kidney, but his appendix Krylenko: executed in 1938 because he had neglected to propagate the social meaning of chess Duchamp: after the game, chess pieces were sent into the air by balloons Kasparov: uproots heavy trees with bare hands FIDE: a banana republic run by gangsters Time trouble: an addiction Soviet chess: before Sputnik circled the earth chess was the only field in which the Soviet Union had caught up with the rest of the world and outdone it

Nor has Ree neglected the dark side of chess. He mentions bribery, conspiracy, intimidation, scandal, con men, imposters, bodyguards, chess bosses, "gruff telephone calls from blackmailers," and bald-faced attempts at cheating. "Sometimes," he writes, it is "hard to distinguish between the chess community and the world of organized crime."

But the best parts of the book are those that communicate Ree's infectious love of the game. Of a match with Topalov, he writes that Kasparov "conjured up an attack out of nothing, with a rook sacrifice," after which he made "fifteen mortal blows in a row, all of marvelous beauty." He concludes by saying, "Those who were privileged to be present knew they would tell it to their children and grandchildren, as long as chess will be played in this world."

This wonderful book gives a thrilling glimpse into a world that ordinary mortals like me would not otherwise see.

The 64-Square Looking Glass

The Great Game of Chess in World Literature

Chess in fiction is most often employed as a superficial metaphor or shallow plot device. There are a number of reasons for this, which probably explains why chess stories are scarce and chess novels even scarcer.

Nevertheless I keep hoping to find a few fictional offerings that genuinely communicate the excitement and dazzle of the game, or at least offer a fresh take on it. Thus I was very pleased to come across this anthology, the most comprehensive I've found so far. It includes a wide selection of verse, non-fiction, short stories, and novel excerpts.

Non-Fiction - 7 selections

The two pieces I enjoyed most are:

"Playing Chess with Arthur Koestler" by Julian Barnes
"Chess Reclaims a Devotee" by Alfred Kreymborg

I've never read anything by Julian Barnes before, but this piece convinced me I must read more. The others are:

Vladimir Nabokov, from Speak, Memory
E.M. Forster, from "Our Diversions" in Abinger Harvest
Charles Krauthammer, "The Romance of Chess"
A.L. Taylor, from The White Knight: A Study of C. L. Dodgson
Andrew Waterman, from his introduction to The Poetry of Chess, an anthology of chess poetry

Verse - 6 selections

Jorge Luis Borges, "Chess"
Lord Dunsany, "The Sea and Chess"
Robert Lowell, "The Winner"
Ezra Pound, "The Game of Chess"
Lord Tennyson, excerpt from Beckett (a verse play)
Bulwer-Lytton, "The Chess-Board" (not that Bulwer-Lytton)

Short Stories - 13 selections

The two I enjoyed most are both humorous:

"Check!" by Slawomir Mrozek
"The Gossage-Varebedian Papers" by Woody Allen

The first (from The Ugupu Bird) is an amusing account of players in a living chess match taking matters into their own hands. The Woody Allen piece is about a postal match gone horribly wrong, and has been called the funniest story ever written about chess. I won't disagree. It can be found online in a number of places.

There is also an excerpt from the novella "The Royal Game" by Stefan Zweig, thought by some to be the best story ever written about chess.

Of the remainder, two are by famous authors -- "All the King's Men" by Kurt Vonnegut (from Welcome to the Monkey House), and "Pawn to King's Four" by Stephen Leacock (from Happy Stories Just to Laugh At).

Three are crime stories:
Harry Kemelman, "End Play"
Theodore Mathieson, "The Chess Partner"
Henry Slesar, "The Poisoned Pawn"

And the rest are:
Poul Anderson, "The Immortal Game"
Spencer Holst, "Chess" from The Language of Cats and Other Stories
Vasily Aksyonov, "The Victory -- A Story with Exaggerations"
Miguel de Unamuno, "The Novel of Dan Sandalio, Chessplayer" from Ficciones
Sholem Aleichem, "From Passover to Succos, or The Chess Player's Story" from Tevye's Daughters

Novel Excerpts - 17 selections

Several come from the hand of famous authors:
Martin Amis, Money
Samuel Beckett, Murphy
Anne Bronte, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass
Thomas Hardy, A Pair of Blue Eyes
Sinclair Lewis, Cass Timberlane
Vladimir Nabokov, The Defense

Four are from detective or espionage novels:
Ian Fleming, From Russia with Love
David Delman, The Last Gambit
John Griffiths, The Memory Man
Alan Sharp, Night Moves

The rest are:
Walter Tevis, The Queen's Gambit
Brad Leithauser, Hence
Claud Cockburn, Beat the Devil
Ilf and Petrov, The Twelve Chairs
Fernando Arrabal, The Tower Struck by Lighting
Elias Canetti, Auto-da-Fe (Canetti was the Nobel winner for literature in 1981)

The Even More Complete Chess Addict

This 1993 book is a revised and expanded version of The Complete Chess Addict, which appeared in 1987. It's a collection of chess anecdotes written in a breezy style, and includes eight pages of black-and-white photos, a bibliography, and an index.

The largest section in the book is taken up with a survey of famous chess players, grouped under these headings: The Royals, The Holy, The Sinners, The Musicians, The Artists, The Writers, The Entertainers, The Sportsmen, The Thinkers, The Politicians, The Soldiers, The Aristocrats, The Businessmen, The Rest.

Subsequent sections are:

The Greatest: the 64 strongest players, the 64 greatest games, etc.

The Frightful: worst games and performances at tournaments, including a game in which a player lost three pieces in 1-1/2 moves.

The Unorthodox: fantasy chess variations. Reverso is one example, in which the opening positions of knights and bishops are reversed. "All opening theory goes out the window. Try it against your club theoretician and watch him flounder!"

The Unacceptable: bad behaviour at the board, including games that turned violent.

The Awesome mentions a number of records, including:
- longest announced mate - 45 moves
- longest series of mutual captures - 13
- longest sequence of successive checks - 43
- longest sequence of moves without a capture - 100

The Bizarre: chess-playing animals, strange openings, and other oddities (eg Bobby Fischer and Barbra Streisand were classmates in Brooklyn).

Desert Island Chess: puzzles and problems.

The final two sections are the most dated, but still fun to read: The Future describes up-and-coming possible greats, and The End? talks about the influence of computer chess programs.

In all, 369 pages of trivia that range from the magnificent to the loony. A very entertaining read.

Classified Encyclopedia of Chess Variants

The precursor to this book, The Encyclopedia of Chess Variants, lists 1450 different games, all based on chess. It was published in 1994, but is now out of print and hard to find. Thus I was overjoyed to learn that a second edition (with a slightly different title, The Classified Encyclopedia of Chess Variants) came out in 2007.

Since it's not currently available in North America, I had to order it through Amazon in the UK. By a strange coincidence it arrived the same day the local library called. Months earlier I had requested the first edition through interlibrary loans. Suddenly I had both books in hand and was eager to compare them.

The most obvious difference is that the second edition has been completely reorganized. Entries are no longer in alphabetical order; they are grouped by type, which explains the word "Classified" in the title. The table of contents runs to eight pages, and includes entries such as:

New pieces
Mutation games
Games for three
Transporting and teleporting
Unorthodox ways of capturing
Boards based on hexagons
Cylindrical, toroidal and spherical boards

If you're looking for a particular game and know its name, you must resort to the index at the back, which uses a decimal numbering system instead of page numbers. For example, the entry for Octopus Chess is 35.4, which means it is found in section 4 of chapter 35. The method is logical but a little cumbersome.

A somewhat larger failing is the sparsity of illustrations, which makes the book less useful than the first edition. Without an illustration, visualizing an unusual game board (such as Three-Player HyperChess, shown here) can be tough.

The reason for the paucity of illustrations is a sad one. The author passed away in 2005 while still working on the second edition. The task was completed by John Beasley, but the original artwork could not be found.

In sum, the first edition is easier to use and more fun to page through. But does that mean I regret purchasing the second edition? Indeed, not. I am delighted to own it and salute John Beasley for helping to keep this unusual and valuable publication in print.

[August 2015 note: The entire book is online at John Beasley's website.] 

More

Pritchard's Popular Chess Variants describes 20 of the most popular games, and in greater detail than his encyclopedia. It's available in North America. There's also lots of info on the Web:
Chess Variant Pages
British Chess Variants Society
Play Chess Variants

The Squares of the City

Though designated science fiction because the author, John Brunner, typically wrote the stuff, this book is more like a thriller by Eric Ambler, where an innocent chap is drawn into a deadly world of foreign intrigue.

The protagonist, Boyd Hakluyt, is a traffic analyst hired to tackle some urban problems in Ciudad de Vados, capital of the fictional South American country of Aguazul. The city is only 10 years old, created as a modern showpiece by the country's benevolent dictator, President Vados. At its core are four gigantic plazas or squares -- hence the novel's title.

The city's image is marred by a couple of unsightly blots -- a noisy stinking market and a slum under a monorail station. The government, fearing an uprising, does not want to use direct methods to clean up these places. Instead it hopes that Boyd can solve the problem by redesigning traffic flows.

Boyd tries to remain neutral as the conflict escalates, but can't avoid being drawn in. On discovering that he's been manipulated he confronts President Vados, who tells him, "You are no mere pawn -- you are a knight."

P-K4

This revelation is no surprise to the reader, for the secret has already been revealed in an introduction by Edward Lasker and a foreword by Brunner himself. The novel recreates an 1892 match between Steinitz and Tchigorin -- hence the true meaning of the book's title.

President Vados and the leader of the opposing forces, Esteban Diaz, Minister of the Interior, have agreed to a match using real people as players (though without their knowledge), thus avoiding an armed conflict that might destroy Vados's beloved city, and needlessly spill the blood of Diaz's people. The use of subliminal messages is one way of manipulating the players.

In a note at the end of the book, Brunner identifies the pieces represented by the characters. Even more impressively, he states that:

...the moves are all there, in their correct order and -- in so far as possible -- in precise correspondence with their effect on the original game. That is to say, support of one piece by another on its own side, threatening of one or more pieces by a piece on the other side, indirect threats and the actual taking of pieces, are all as closely represented as possible in the development of the action.

Note, however, that the city is not an exact analog of the chessboard. Brunner makes no attempt (as far as I could see) to divide Ciudad de Vados into 64 locations.

Steinitz vs Tchigorin

I found the book's conceit so engaging that I played through the actual game itself, and made a discovery. The causes of a couple deaths are hinted at in the book but not conclusively stated. In the game the truth is revealed.

I also found it interesting that Brunner avoids some obvious casting choices (the two queens are represented by men, and Bishop Cruz is a rook not a bishop), and that the novel ends without the conflict being concluded (though in the actual game Black resigns).

I wondered too about Brunner's choice of this particular game. Was there a sly subtext involved? Did it have something to do with the fact that Steinitz (born in Prague but living in the US) defeated Tchigorin (a Russian)? That is, that a peasant revolt against established authority was doomed to failure?

The game was played in Havana. You can replay it here. Choose no. 16.

Stranger Than Fiction

The Squares of the City was published in 1965. Thirty years later President Kirsan Ilyumzhinov of the Russian Republic of Kalmykia built a modern complex devoted to the game, situated outside the capital of Elista. He called it Chess City. Kalmykia is poor, but Ilyumzhinov, who is also president of FIDE, is obsessed with chess.

Where Chess is King and People are Pawns

King's Gambit

A Son, A Father, and the World's Most Dangerous Game

At the highest levels chess is a brutal punishing sport, a black-hole that can swallow up lives. It's truth, it's beauty, it's the universe in 64 squares. Hence the billions of chess books about how to improve your game, though King's Gambit is not one of them. It focuses on the human side of chess -- the odd personalities, the strange behaviour, the game's narcotic fascination.

The author lunches with Garry Kasparov, visits Nigel Short at home, sits in on lessons given by Bruce Pandolfini, and travels to Libya for a tournament with his friend, the Canadian champion Pascal Charbonneau.

The book also exposes the sordid underbelly of chess, the scams and swindles, the shabby tricks and dirty politics. Nigel Short is quoted as saying, "Those who were brought up under [the Soviet] system all have the same warped outlook: 'You fuck with my wife--I kill you. I fuck with your wife--you keep quiet if you know what's good for you.'"

Running counterpoint to the author's explorations in the world of chess is the story of his own life, in particular his relationship with his father, a prodigiously talented person who taught literature at New York's New School, was once hired to write the entire issue of a leading women's magazine, and hustled at billiards and ping pong. Yes, ping pong! Unfortunately he was also a pathological liar.

The dust jacket quotes praise from Jared Diamond, Oliver Sachs, and Simon Winchester. When I read books this good, I wonder why I bother with fiction.

Author's Website