Archive for Reviews
Monday, March 22, 2010 23:56
While there are numerous competing theories on how to improve one's chess, one thing that is absolutely undisputed in chess training philosophy is how to stay sharp in chess: by regularly solving tactical chess puzzles. It doesn't much matter how you do it, as long as you do it frequently, so why not practice your chess tactics with two good and...
Tuesday, March 09, 2010 23:26
Having read mostly chess improvement books and opening manuals lately, I was delighted to see a new publication in the best tradition of chess writing: a serious tournament book. Strangely, it's a tradition that seems rather unpopular these days - a very unfortunate development indeed.
The tournament book tradition has given us many classics, e.g...
Tuesday, March 02, 2010 23:04
My first reaction when I learned about the book Improve Your Chess at any Age was one of sheer jealousy: some club player writing a book about chess improvement?! How unfair! There must be thousands of club players around the world who'd want the exact same thing - including me.
This is the last part of a 'triptych' on recent chess improvement...
Thursday, February 18, 2010 22:35
The Dutch quarterly Matten provides a mixture of interviews, stories and anecdotes with a literary flavour, interweaved with drawings, cartoons and photos. We bring a review of the 7th edition in the Dutch language, together with a review of De Pion, the first book of a new series on chess pieces by endgame composer (and ChessVibes contributor)...
Tuesday, February 09, 2010 19:15
What do a game of chess and a nude decending a staircase have in common? To answer such questions, you must be prepared to leave your conventional ways of thinking at home and then fall down Marcel Duchamp's rabbit-hole of chess and art.
A few weeks ago I visited an exhibition in the Picasso Museum in Barcelona, Spain. The exhibition featured...
Thursday, January 28, 2010 19:38
Here's a confession: I've had Viktor Moskalenko's latest book Revolutionize Your Chess in my possession for weeks already, but I've been reluctant to review it. The reason, quite simply, is this: I don't like it at all.
I loved Moskalenko's previous work, The Flexible French, hands down. I positively reviewed it back in 2008, and I also rather...
Tuesday, December 22, 2009 4:17
No matter how much criticism Vladimir Nabokov's posthumously published The Orginal of Laura recently received, I instantly bought the book - and liked it all the same. Some writers are just always worth reading. In contemporary chess literature, apart from the big stars such as Kasparov and Shirov, authors that are always worth buying and reading...
Friday, December 18, 2009 2:07
As an experienced player, when I came across “The Immortal Game: A History of Chess”, by David Shenk, I didn’t feel much inclined to pick it up. I mean, after having read such classics as The Development of Chess Style by Max Euwe, and Chess History and Reminiscences, by Bird, what could some general history have to offer? Further, the author, by...
Wednesday, December 09, 2009 23:48
Are chess books getting better? Take the first volume of The Complete Hedgehog by Sergey Shipov: although I've read many books on the Hedgehog system, I think this is the best one by far. It's more accessible, better explained, better written, it's much more interesting for readers who do not play the Hedgehog at all, and it's funny on top of that...
Monday, November 30, 2009 23:44
Chess is interesting, and chess openings are interesting too. There is nothing scary about opening theory, but there is nothing sacred about it either. This is the message Paul van der Sterren wants to give his readers in his 468-page book Fundamental Chess Openings, published by Gambit. He succeeds wonderfully in bringing this message home.
A...
