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Power Chess with Pieces The Ultimate Guide to the Bishop Pair & Strong Knights Reviewed by David Surratt
The bishop pair. Strong knight. Bad bishop. How often we see these expressions in chess commentary, in the notes given to master games, or as a passing reference in some instructional text! Yet, do we really understand these concepts? Do you know when to exchange, which pieces to keep on the board, when to head to the endgame? In most of my encounters with these phrases, I see them bandied about as though their meaning were obvious, and should be known by everyone. While the latter is true, their seems to be a dearth of material which fully explains these important strategic ideas. Where can one learn about these concepts? In Power Chess with Pieces former World Champion Candidate Jan Timman sets about clarifying these and related concepts for the aspiring chessplayer: "Of all strategic concepts, that of knight against bad bishop is undoubtedly one of the best-known and most easily recognizes ones. The strong knight dominates the bishop, whose range of action is restricted by one or more of it's own pawns, which have been fixed on the bishop's squares... Another important strategic given is the bishop-pair. The possession of the bishop pair has not always been regarded as a self-evident advantage...It was only after Wilhelm Steinitz that these insights changed, and in the 20th century the bishop pair is generally regarded as a powerful weapon."
The material in Power Chess with Pieces is divided into five chapters:
Each chapter contains carefully annotated illustrative games, twenty-eight complete games in all. Only in Chapter Two, which cuts right to the chase, are the games themselves truncated, beginning at the endgame stage of selected master games. Most games used in Power Chess with Pieces date from the past twenty years or so, with a few notable exceptions (Flohr-Capablanca, Moscow 1935, or Capablanca-Reshevsky, Nottingham 1936, e.g.) and include some of the strongest and most technically proficient GMs of the era: Karpov, Kasparov, Shirov, Sokolov, Yusupov, Anand, Leko, Kramnik, Polgar, etc. Of course, Timman also draws on his own games as well. Power Chess with Pieces presents the material in a
familiar two-columns per page format, using a combination of the long
version of figurine algebraic notation (FAN) [where regular algebraic would
say Kb4, this long version offers the same move as
If you are still with me, then only two questions remain to be answered: how well does Timman do at explaining these concepts, and is his writing style one that you can relate to? Both questions are best answered with an example from the book itself. Chapter 3, Domination of the Pair of Bishops, contains ten illustrative games, including this one (for the purposes of this review, I have substituted conventional algebraic notation for the FAN used in the book): Ljubojevic,L (2595) - Khalifman,A (2645) [D42] 1.c4 c6 2.e4 d5 3.exd5 cxd5 4.d4 Nf6 5.Nc3 e6 6.Nf3 Be7 7.cxd5 Nxd5 8.Bd3 Nc6 9.0-0 0-0 10.Re1 Bf6 11.Be4 Nce7 12.Ne5 Nc6 13.Qd3 h6 14.a3 Nde7
We pick up Timman's commentary at this point. As an aside, please note that the author has spent slightly more than two pages introducing the game and commenting on the first 14 moves.
Here we'll leave Timman's notes, which run on for nearly another two pages. The rest of the game went: 35...Ng4+ 36.Kf3 gxf4 37.Kxf4 Bd7 38.Bb6 Kf6 39.Bd4+ Kg6 40.a4 Be6 41.b4 Bd7 42.a5 Nh6 43.Bb2 Ng4 44.Bc3 Nf2 45.Bd4 Ng4 46.Bd1 Kh6 47.Bf3 Bc8 48.Bd5 Kg6 49.Bc3 Nh6 50.Ke5 Nf7+ 51.Kd4 Nd6 52.Be1 Ne4 53.Ke5 Kg5 54.Be6 Bxe6 55.Kxe6 Kf4 56.Kd7 Ke3 57.Kc7 Ke2 58.Bh4 Kd3 59.Kxb7 Kc4 60.Kxa6 Kxb4 61.Kb6 1-0 Personally, I just love Timman's writing style - clear and straightforward. You could read the entire 229 pages in a weekend, but you wouldn't really want to. This book should be savored, and time spent to learn the many lessons therein. Much can be learned in general, for all improving chessplayers, for as another source of fantastically well annotated master games, this collection is really hard to beat. In my opinion, the most benefit will accrue to players of around Elo 1800 and up, at least for those players ready to learn the paradoxically advanced, yet basic, concepts Timman illustrates.
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That Jan Timman is well qualified to expound on these
concepts should be, like the advantage of the bishop pair, self-evident.
However, for those younger members of the chess fraternity, those who did
not grow up reading about Timman's battles with the other chess greats of
the last century, I hasten to add the following biographical details about
this great GM: born December 14, 1951, Timman is a famous Dutch
chessplayer who had his greatest successes in the 1970s through the early
1990s. He has won the national championship of the Netherlands nine
times, spanning three decades. He played for the FIDE World
Championship in 1993, losing to Anatoly Karpov (+2-6=13) as well as losing
in the Candidates Finals twice, to Karpov (again!) in 1990, and Short in
1993. For another sample of Timman's writing see 
c4-b4]
for the game moves, but regular FAN for all analysis. Not sure I
understand why it switches back and forth like that though. It "feels"
weird to me. The
diagrams are on the small side, but make up for this with the sharpness of
the detail. Besides, in a book like this, a study book, diagrams are
not as important, since the maximum benefit is derived from actually setting
up a board & playing through the moves and the analysis. The paper is
clean and strong, the binding glued. If you are familiar with the
publisher's (New In Chess) strong production values, you will know what to
expect from
Power Chess with Pieces.
