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Who knows? The fun thing about knowing something about chess players is that it immediately makes you want to know more about them. And knowing something about some chess players makes you want to learn something about other chess players. I’ve never discovered a boring chess player.
That one is easy. They would have produced something like Zhivko Kaikamjozov’s eminently readable and endlessly enjoyable The Genius and the Misery of Chess.
Kaikamjozov, editor of the Bulgarian chess magazine Chess Thought and a FIDE International Arbiter, has written 33 chess books. Some of them may be more serious than his current one, but I am not sure how many of them are more accessible. In The Genius and the Misery of Chess he presents profiles, from a couple of pages to almost a dozen pages in length, of chess players from As-Suli (880 - 946) to Magnus Carlsen (1990 - ). He includes an important game position, or a game or two, for each player. The coverage is easy reading, and sure to provide many new tidbits for the next discussion at the local chess club or bar. While many of the players covered will be familiar to readers, it is great to see coverage of such lesser-known folks as Rudolf von Bilguer, Rudof Charousek, Gioachino Greco, Isidor Gunsberg, Gustav Neumann, David Przepiorka, Mark Stolberg, Cecil de Vere and Carl Walbrodt, to name a few. Each chapter in The Genius and the Misery of Chess has a player’s photograph, and they run the full range from “captured the essence of the person” to “driver’s license photo.” Some of those of earlier chess players look like photocopies of photocopies, but perhaps that couldn’t be helped. Occasionally pictures of the players at an early age are used, and this can be fun, e.g. that of young Έtienne Bacrot, for example. (Are there any pictures available of GM Humpy Koneru where she is not frowning or glaring? Perhaps if the author showed her Sergey Karjakin’s image from the book as inspiration…?) Although the book is attractively produced by the good people at Mongoose Press, there are a few things that might do with some attention for the next printing or edition. There are some silly typos (e.g. page 31, “1980” and “1981” when the author clearly is referring to years a century earlier) and occasional inconsistencies in spelling or notation (e.g. decimals are set off by either a “.” or a “,” but not both). One final comment, on the “Misery” in the title of the book: many chess players today have grown up in the post-Bobby Fischer era, where being a Chess World Champion is a “Big Thing” and where compensation for top chess play exists, sometimes handsomely. It wasn’t always that way. Early chess masters often played under the direst of circumstances, with little resources to fall back upon, very reminiscent of the imaginary answer to the question “Why did the chicken cross the road?” attributed to Ernest Hemingway: “To die. In the rain.”
Kaikamjozov’s The Genius and the Misery of Chess doesn’t so much answer the question as to get the reader thinking about the question.
From the Publisher's website: Zhivko Kaikamjzov, author of 33 chess books, was born in 1931 in Dobrich (Bulgaria) and graduated from the Sofia Institute of Economics. Chess master Zhivko established the first Bulgarian chess school for children in his home town in January of 1962. Kaikamjozov is well-known in the chess world, particularly to his students; including grandmasters Velikov, Spassov, and Voiska, as well as Topalov's manager Silvio Danailov. He was the manager of Bulgarian chess federation in the 1980s, and is an international arbiter, elected President of the East-European zone of FIDE and became a member of the FIDE Central Committee in 1986; one of the referees of the world title match Kasparov vs. Karpov in London (1990); an editor of the Bulgarian chess magazine Chess Thought and has been a journalist since the mid 1990s.
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