Jumbo shrimp.

Short speech.

Sharp curve.

Random pattern.

True Lies.

I really like Grandmaster Comas Fabregó’s book – his verve, his attitude, his skepticism, his hard work – I just trip over his book’s title. (Maybe it’s a marketing thing.)

It turns out that from that entire array of books that captivated us in our childhood, only a few were really worthwhile, and even these were full of lies and mistakes.

Especially mistakes:

The latter are caused by several reasons: the authors’ lack of chess strength, scant ability to pass on their knowledge, superficial analysis, etc. This can have a damaging and enduring impact on our development as chess players.

The author never quite gets around to the “Lies” part of things – I can imagine Reinfeld and Horowitz, half a century ago, whispering conspiratorially, Sure, you know and I know that a Queen is worth 12 pawns, but let’s keep the rubes in the dark and tell them she’s only worth 9...

What GM Comas Fabregó is really concerned about is objectivity in chess, and, as a result, a necessary skepticism by chess players toward knowledge that has been passed on – as Petrosian said, “trust – but verify.”

In the games that appear in the classic manuals the analysis is usually too one-sided.  History is always written by the winners and often their research lacks objectivity.  Later treatises blindly copy these “exemplary games” thus reinforcing the transmission of the inaccurate, sometimes utterly false, knowledge they try to show.

True Lies in Chess is a delightful smorgasbord of dishes built around that concern.  Chapter 1 is not only titled “Do not Trust the Classics” its sub-sections are equally challenging:

“The tip of the iceberg”

“Dogmatic = Limited”

“Some more rigour would not be amiss…”

“Applying what has been learnt”

“Challenging the heavyweights”

“Nobody is without sin”

Throughout, the author shows his hard work – he doesn’t just disagree with others, he shows where they were wrong.  The simplest bypassed path, he teaches, could be the actual way out of the forest.  Although he provides many lines of analysis, they’re all generously ladled with explanations, lest they otherwise become dry and unpalatable.  It is very tasty prose, at that.

The second chapter gives selections of “Middlegame Motifs”, and the third one, those from the endgame, “Final Conclusions?” (end result, classic tradition, crimson red, dark night… er, sorry about that – RK ).

Chapters four and five concern the beginnings of the game, and are very beefy: “How are Opening Novelties Born?” and “The Opening According to Me – or Why I like …Na6 in the King’s Indian.”

Generally the image of an opening expert is a person surrounded by monographs and think volumes of encyclopaedias.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

This might seem strange to the reader.  I will go further: I am going to assert that the real opening specialist is that player who has a perfect mastery of the middlegame and the ending. Why? It turns out that all the stages are intimately related and one cannot master one of them without having a deep understanding of the others. The aforementioned encyclopaedias are the clearest example of that famous statement “information is not the same as knowledge”.

So, dear readers, Lluís Comas Fabregó analyzes master and grandmaster games, and looks within them for possible opening novelties.  He is not going to give you the latest cream puff in 1.b4 or 1.g4 openings.  He does model – and explain – the process to go through to arrive at substantial new ideas that will last beyond the first or second course.  Serious club players, experts on up, and youth planning to be masters will all bulk up from attending to these chapters (and this book).

The final chapter, “The Others”, is a tribute to “a series of exceptional classical chess players from the old Soviet Union who have been unfairly underrated by Western literature.”  There are deeply annotated games played by Chigorin, Rauzer, Bondarevsky, Smyslov, Keres, Boleslavsky, Lilienthal, Ragozin, and Furman.  (How many do you think Fischer studied?  Think about it.)

True Lies in Chess is very well produced, as can be expected from Quality Chess.  The layout is double-columned, with one or two diagrams per page.  Use of fonts, bolding and white space is very well done.  The book begins with a Bibliography (yay!), List of Symbols, and Foreword and closes with an Index of Games and Fragments and Index of Names.

The final note reflects the author’s perspective:

This game is significant because it shows the potential of using ideas (rather than just calculating moves) to analyze a position.

True Lies in Chess is  Grandmaster Comas Fabregó’s first book for Quality Chess.  I hope he is already working on another one.
 

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