Looks at Books / Tournament Books
In Praise of Tournament Books
An aficionado guides you to which books covering the great tournaments should be in your library. By PETE TAMBURRO
I
n this age of databases and instant news on websites, tourna- ment books—once the stuff of legend—are now a lost art. We of the older generation remember treasuring the great souvenirs of those titanic tournaments.
You would make your way through
every one of Alexander Alekhine’s notes to New York 1924 in the Dover paper- back edition. In 1978 and 1979, Oscar Freedman’s translation in hardcover of David Bronstein’s Zurich 1953 was quickly followed by Jim Marfia’s trans- lation in paperback (Dover) of Bronstein’s book. Marfia had enter- tained many of us who subscribed to his Michigan state magazine over the prior years to read his serialized ver- sion. Either way we got to be instruct ed by Bronstein. His tournament book was a “how to understand the middle game” for many of us. There were others: Nottingham 1936,
Hastings 1895, a mimeographed work by a very young Larry Evans on Vienna, 1922, to name a few. You could get your hands on those. There were some great hardcovers
on the world championship matches, most notably by British champion Harry Golombek—The World Chess Championship 1948 being the best of those. Over the last few decades, Dale Bran-
dreth with his Caissa Press had limited edition tournament books on Karlsbad, 1907; St. Petersburg, 1914; Baden Baden, 1925 and then concentrated on the 1930s with Bled, 1931; Moscow, 1935; Moscow, 1936; and AVRO, 1938. This hardcover “red book” series is now in the hands of collectors all over the world. Some of these well-crafted books are still available from him.
12 June 2014 | Chess Life
However, these tournament books were all classics. Every
now and then, a contemporary tournament would get a decent book. Andrew Karklins came out with a little gem on the 1964 USSR Zonal Tournament. The two Piatagorsky Cup books from the six- ties, especially the second one, were excellent. San Antonio 1972 gave it a shot with Bent Larsen and David Levy. Wijk aan Zee, 1975 by Lubosh Kavalek came out as a full-fledged hardcover, but you could tell it was starting to wane. Lots of paperback tournament books came out with game score dumps and minimalist notes, although Grandmaster Chess (Lone Pine 1975), published by Ishi Press, had some fas- cinating deep notes to some of the games by Jude Acers. The 1972 Bobby Fischer-Boris Spassky match produced a bunch of match books, the best of which was C. J. S. Purdy’s How Fischer Won. 20 years later, it was the “other” Fischer- Spassky match that GM Yasser Seirawan and George Stefanovic cov- ered so well in No Regrets. Still, it didn’t seem quite enough.
What was the big deal about the old tournament books? There were more than moves! There was history. There were notes to each game by a generally dedicated annotator like a Marco or Alekhine. There was a kind of passion
of the times in many of the notes. There was drama. There was humor. There was even contradiction. In the New York 1889 (6th American Chess Congress) volume Steinitz has two distinct annotations about this position with Black to play:
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