Checkmate! Great Champions and Epic Matches From a Timeless Game

[Kevin Thurlow]

Checkmate! Great Champions and Epic Matches From a Timeless Game
By Ben Graff
Published by White Star, 208 pp, Price about £25 (dependent on supplier)

The title and subtitle disclose the theme of the book. The publishers were inspired by the success of the televised version of “Queen’s Gambit” to invite Ben Graff to write the book. It has been published in French, Italian and German, as well as English. The publishers aimed more at people that are not regular players, but obviously they would hope that experienced players would also like it.
Well, this one did. The first thing to note is that it is big and heavy, and not suitable for reading on a train or plane. The production qualities are great – a solid hard cover, high quality paper, clear photographs, diagrams and text. On first sight, you think it might be a coffee-table book, just great to look at, but the text is great as well.
The author takes us through the world champions from Steinitz to Carlsen. There are informative biographies (about two pages) on each player, together with their world championship results and rating, whether published or estimated. There are also two games, one from a world championship match, and one other game. These have brief comments and diagrams at crucial positions. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the biographies included information I did not already know. The PCA/FIDE schism is covered, and the world champions in the book follow the Kasparov route until reunification. After the world champions, there is a “Queen’s Gambit” section with similar treatment of Vera Menchik, Nona Gaprindashvili and Judit Polgar. The next chapter covers great matches, Spassky -Fischer, Karpov – Korchnoi (1978) and Karpov – Kasparov (1984). The book ends with a chapter on computers and a brief epilogue.
I did find a couple of typos - Gaprindashvili is rendered “Garpindashvili” once (I hope she doesn’t sue…), but not enough to be annoying.
The book is a very good introduction to chess and its champions and some of the peculiarities associated with them.

[Roger de Coverly]

The author takes us through the world champions from Steinitz to Carlsen. There are informative biographies (about two pages) on each player, together with their world championship results and rating, whether published or estimated.

One perhaps should be thankful that Edward Winter has mostly retired. Otherwise it's the type of book where he would go through it line by line pointing out all the supposed errors,

[Matt Mackenzie]

And there's nothing wrong with that