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Chessville
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The other day a chess friend told me he was trying to decide if he should buy Alexi Shriov’s Fire on Board II, Neil Sullivan’s Chess is a Struggle: My Selected Games (which I recently reviewed here at Chessville), or wait for Kasparov’s upcoming CD on the Najdorf Sicilian. I am not kidding. Masters may raise a skeptical John Belushi-style eyebrow here, but up-and-coming club players will sympathize with my pal’s dilemma – which of the above will actually help him improve his chess game? I have the first Fire on Board, and it’s quite amazing, with annotations and play that help me imagine what a chess game post mortem between Carlos Castaneda and Timothy Leary might have looked like. I read through the book once, “skimming” the analysis, then slipped it onto the shelf, and have scarcely touched it since. (I may have peeked into it when reviewing Sakaev and Semkov’s Latest Trends in the Semi-Slav: Anti -Meran.) Equally troubling, out of about 450 titles up there with Fire on Board, maybe 60% are on the opening phase of the game – and no matter which ones I’ve opened, I’m still a class B player today. My Blackmar-Diemer Gambit may be tricky, but it doesn’t hold a candle to the complexities and interpretations of my buddy’s Najdorf. Some days I wonder what either of us is doing spending so much time and effort studying and riding our own respective opening hobby horses. Now comes along Andy Fletcher’s My 35 Most Memorable Games, Lessons of a Weekend Warrior – another Canadian player (living currently in Michigan), another believer in Botvinnik’s challenge to analyze one’s own games and then put them before the critical eyes of the public, and another challenge to the notion that I must commune solely with the Masters in order to gain wisdom. This 5½ x 8¼ inch book, with attractive color graphics on the cover and one or two diagrams per page, gives a look at the author’s chess from 1972 to 1999; from the Lakeshore Chess Club when he lived in Montreal, to Toronto, and then on to Michigan. According to the biographical information on the back cover:
Part of the fun of reading My 35 Most Memorable Games for me is to catch glimpses of the author, and those he plays against:
Fletcher believes that players have different strengths in different parts of the game, and that he is highest rated in the endgame. His game selections reflect this, as do his notes. Although there are all sorts of topical openings such as the Sicilian Najdorf and the Benko Gambit, his analytical and explanatory focus is primarily on the middlegame and afterward. This accounted for the near-migraine – no, more of a painful flashback – that I experienced after playing over the first half dozen or so of the games. You know the kind: you’re “playing up” against one of the top club players, you might have a tiny “advantage” coming out of the opening, but he just keeps making moves; nothing fancy at first (but you find you’re at a disadvantage), nothing fancy as the game goes on (but it’s clear that you have no counterplay and your game is dismal), and nothing fancy in the endgame (but you are busted and have to turn over your King) – RoboChamp 1, PawnPusher 0. Fletcher cracked me up – ouch! – with references to his “immortal zugzwang game” and to a game where he plays his 32nd move and writes “Now I conclude the game in bold positional style.” Mind you, there’s plenty of slam-bang chess, as in the following position from 1985 when facing Rakhinshteyn and the Polugaevsky variation in the Sicilian Defense (notes by Fletcher):
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