Chess Books

The Chess Books That Helped Me To Become a Grandmaster

I learned to play chess in 1986 and was immediately struck by a chess fever. I started playing at home and at school but soon I started to study with books.

At that time this was my only way of learning. There was no internet nor tournaments in my city. So the books were an essential part of my progress.

This is the list of the most important books I studied until I achieved the GM title. They are not the best books ever written but those who helped me most on this journey. I think this list can be useful to chess enthusiasts for two main reasons:

1- To understand the way forward and what types of books are most important in the formation of a chess player;

2- To find similar, up to date, works or read the same books – some are classics and timeless in value.

The books will be shown in chronological order. That is, the earliest books were studied at the beginning of my development and the last ones when I was already close to the grandmaster title.

Bobby Fischer gave you the bug. Tell me about his book, My 60 Memorable Games

It’s not clear how much of this book was written by Fischer and how much was written by a grandmaster called Larry Evans, who was a friend of his and a very strong player. Nonetheless, officially, this is Fischer’s only game collection. The 60 games begin in 1957 and go up to 1967, so it’s only 10 years. What is very attractive about the book – apart from the fact that Fischer was such an extraordinary player and analyst – is the honesty of his comments. There was always a simplicity to Fischer which was seductive, even if at times it could also be very crude. Now one thinks of Fischer as someone who would never admit to any kind of error or weakness, but this book sprang from an earlier part of his life.

He’s laceratingly self-critical, which is quite unusual in these kinds of books. He uses phrases like, “I already knew that I had been outplayed.” Or, “I just underestimated the force of his reply.” It also contains three of his losses, whereas you tend to find in these “best of my games” books that it will all be wins.

At the beginning, he quotes Emanuel Lasker, a great world champion of the early 20th century, saying that on the chessboard, “Lies and hypocrisy do not survive long. The creative combination lays bare the presumption of the lie; the merciless fact, culminating in a checkmate, contradicts the hypocrite.” This is an aspect of chess which was especially compelling to me as an adolescent. There is no hypocrisy in it, no duplicity. Everything is open, you can’t hide and you can’t prevaricate. To people of a certain age, boys perhaps, that is very attractive. And Fischer, in that sense, never grew up.

The games themselves, Fischer’s best games, have a fantastic clarity, which is particular to his style. A lot of the very greatest players, and particularly the Soviet players, rather relished high levels of strategic and tactical complexity. Fischer sought clarity, and achieving it is, in a way, more difficult. This is why sometimes comparisons are made between Fischer and Mozart. As a young player, learning chess, you may not be able to emulate it, but you can understand clearly what he is trying to do. It’s not sophisticated, it’s not deliberately obscure. That was very attractive to me, and many other people, coming to terms with the game at that period.

The Chess Struggle in Practice

Bronstein was very nearly world champion. In 1951 he played a match that was drawn, and because he was the challenger, the titleholder Botvinnik kept the title. It was very controversial because Bronstein was one game ahead with two to play, and lost the penultimate game in rather strange circumstances. This was during the Stalinist period, and it was said that because he was distantly related to Trotsky, and his father had been in a gulag, the Soviet system didn’t want him to win. I don’t think he deliberately threw it, but he was under certain unusual pressures. Bronstein is a marvellous writer. He wrote the best books of the era, and this is by no means his only great book.

It’s about one of the great tournaments of all time, to find an official challenger for the world championship then held by Botvinnik. Apart from Botvinnik, of course, it had all the great players of an extraordinary era: Tal, Bronstein himself, Keres, Smyslov, who won the tournament, Reshevsky, the American champion. It was a massive tournament, 28 rounds, of the sort that nowadays you just wouldn’t have.

Bronstein’s notes, rather like Fischer’s, are full of verve and honesty. He gives you a tremendous sense of what is happening in the middle game. He tends to ignore the opening and the ending, and concentrates on what he says is “the heart and soul of chess”. He gives you very sharp analysis, of course, but also the sense of having a ringside seat, right next to the players. So he describes a game where Reshevsky is playing and wins against another Russian, Boleslavsky. He says: “To understand the following curious events, one must know, first of all, that they occurred when Reshevsky was in tremendous time trouble, and secondly, that all this occurred very late at night. The 22nd round fell on a Saturday.” Reshevsky was an orthodox Jew, so, “For religious reasons, he started his Saturday games after… the rise of the evening star; on Fridays he played his games during the day, so as to finish before the rise of that same star.” So Reshevsky was not just moving very quickly because he didn’t have much time, but because he couldn’t play any longer.

Bronstein is full of these flashes of insight, which explain what otherwise would be a mystery if you just studied the moves. It’s the kind of book one never stops reading, and it also marked a significant period in the development of chess. These were the golden years of what became known as the “Soviet School of Chess”, when there were an extraordinary number of very strong Soviet players, who developed openings in a way that had never been seen before. Their preparation went right into the middle game, and their analysis was much deeper and much more rigorous than anything that had happened before. It was the dawn of the professional age. They called themselves amateurs, because they had commissions in the Soviet armed forces, but they were the first fruits of a special generation created by a great nation committing itself to the idea of people playing chess full time.

These are top two books that could improve your chess game to a considerable level.