Book Note: Karolyi on Tal

Because there are just too many books coming out to keep up with, I’ll be doing some brief book notes along with my longer, in-depth reviews and essays. This is the second of those notes. – JH

Karolyi, Tibor. Mikhail Tal’s Best Games 1: 1949-1959, The Magic of Youth. Glasgow: Quality Chess, 2014. ISBN 978-1907982774. PB 448pp. List $29.95, currently $23.70 on Amazon.

Karolyi, Tibor. Mikhail Tal’s Best Games 2: 1960-1971, The World Champion. Glasgow: Quality Chess, 2015. ISBN 978-1907982798. PB 360pp. List $29.95, currently $21.74 on Amazon.

In the course of researching the games of Mikhail Tal for a forthcoming Chess Life review, I had the opportunity – and the pleasure – to spend some time with Tibor Karolyi’s two volumes on Tal. (A third, covering the remainder of Tal’s playing career, is in press.) Excluding Tal’s own efforts, there are no finer books on Tal in print.

Karolyi follows a recipe in these two books that he first cooked up in his two books on Karpov for Quality Chess. (Those books, Karpov’s Strategic Wins 1: The Making of a Champion and Karpov’s Strategic Wins 2: The Prime Years, can also be recommended.) He breaks Tal’s career down by year, interspersing deeply annotated games with discussion of tournament situation, personalities, and Tal’s personal life. Summaries of each year’s results conclude chapters, and indexes by player and page number are included along with a rough index of themes found in Tal’s games.

While Karolyi includes many of Tal’s most famous sacrificial efforts, he also analyses more ‘workman-like’ games, including no small number of his endgames. Karolyi is a diligent analyst, and while he (like many of his Quality Chess brethren) can sometimes present more analysis than can be easily digested, this is surely preferable to offering too little. The image of Tal we get through these books is of a much more well-rounded player than commonly thought.

Karolyi also spends a lot of time, and obviously spent a lot of effort, contextualizing each game. In some cases he sheds light on the identity of Tal’s opponent, while in others he sketches the situation Tal found himself in while playing the game. Many personal anecdotes are relayed, and the book is much richer for it.

69 fully annotated games are found in Volume 1, while Volume 2 contains 66 complete scores. Dozens of fragments and game citations (some with notes) are given as well. When the third volume is released, Karolyi will have given the chess world a comprehensive and compelling account of Tal the player and Tal the man. It will only further burnish the legend that is Mikhail Tal.

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Book Note: Dvoretsky’s Endgame Manual (4th Edition)

Because there are just too many books coming out to keep up with, I’ll be doing some brief book notes along with my longer, in-depth reviews and essays. This is the first of those notes. – JH

Dvoretsky, Mark. Dvoretsky’s Endgame Manual, 4th edition. Milford: Russell Enterprises, 2014. 424pp. ISBN 978-1941270042. PB $34.95; currently $26ish on Amazon.

Dvoretsky’s Endgame Manual (DEM) is, for my money, the best single-volume endgame textbook in print. (There is an argument to be made for Muller & Lamprecht’s Fundamental Chess Endings, but that is an issue for another post.) Originally published in 2003, DEM is now in its fourth edition and fifth printing. What has been changed for this new edition?

The first thing that a reader might notice is an increase in the number of diagrams in the text. Dvoretsky claims in his author’s note to this edition that some 200 diagrams have been added, making it easier for his readers to study the book without a board. (What an optimist!) As new seven-person tablebases have become available, analysis of such positions has been checked and corrected where necessary. Other corrections – notably in the realm of certain rook endgames – have also been included, as theory has progressed dramatically in some cases, even since the previous edition was published in 2011.

Much of this movement in the theory of rook endgames is due to the remarkable analysis of a few obsessive endgame fans in the ChessPub Endgame forums. Dvoretsky pays special tribute to the work of Vardan Poghosyan, an endgame specialist whom I have mentioned in an earlier review, as being particularly important in this regard.

It is often said that opening books are out of date as soon as they are printed, as new games and new ideas are produced every day. This is less true of endgame manuals, but it is still a fact of publishing life. Another drawing idea in the Kantorovich / Steckner position was discovered by Jacob Aagaard earlier this year and verified by Poghosyan in the Chesspub forums. Because this discovery appeared too late for inclusion in the new edition of DEM, I provide it here. The position is 9-158 in DEM 4th edition, 9-144 in DEM 3rd edition.

http://www.viewchess.com/cbreader/2014/12/26/Game1157185234.html

While there are a number of improvements to this new edition of DEM, there is also potentially a regression. Some readers of earlier editions, notably the first and second, complained that some of the blue print (used to denote key theoretical positions and analysis) was fainter than they would have preferred. A few of the pages in my copy of this new edition suffer from the same problem. There are even a few pages where both the black and blue print are faint. All pages are fully legible, and I cannot say whether problem is unique to my copy or endemic to many; still, if you are sensitive to such things, be aware.

I don’t think you can call yourself a serious student of the endgame and not own Dvoretsky’s Endgame Manual. If you already own it, you can probably skip upgrading to the new edition, unless you (like me) are the sort of person who likes to have the most up-to-date theory at your disposal. If you don’t have it on your bookshelf, you should SERIOUSLY consider adding it to your collection.