The life of a professional chess player is a lonely one, spent camouflaging fears and insecurities from competitors while fighting those same demons behind the chess board for hours on end.
Genna Sosonko paints a series of wonderful, empathetic portraits of (sometimes tortured) geniuses of chess, many of whom he knew intimately through long years of friendship.
It’s a book of deep humanity that moved me differently every time I read it. It’s the book to gift to a non-chess player to articulate why chess can fascinate you all your life and why life in chess is so much more than just the moves on the board!
Genna Sosonko is widely acclaimed as the most prominent chronicler of a unique era in chess history when the Soviet Union developed chess into an ideological weapon to demonstrate the power of socialism. Sosonko was born in Leningrad, where he lived for 29 years. After he emigrated to the Netherlands, he became a world-class chess grandmaster. This monumental book is a collection of the portraits and profiles Genna Sosonko wrote for New in Chess Magazine, including legends such as Mikhail Tal, Viktor Korchnoi and David Bronstein, and unforgettable personalities such as 'Chip' Chepukaitis and Sergey Nikolaev. The Foreword is by…
Anyone taking up a new game knows the struggle to gain a foothold in the game's strategy. You glean knowledge of what is "right" and "wrong" by observing your peers and repeating their moves to look respectable, but you rarely understand why such knowledge has become accepted wisdom.
This fascinating book traces the evolution of chess openings from the first manuals written to the dawn of the 20th century.
I've been a chess player for more than 40 years but I lost count of the number of times I muttered, "Oh my goodness, That's where that move came from!" while reading it! One to make the chess nerd happy!
Most chess biographies present the games of famous players--but not their writings. Filling that gap, this book begins with Syrian master and author of chess studies Philip Stamma, and finishes with the first world champion William Steinitz. The main novelties in opening, middlegame and endgame theory in the 160 year period are examined and biographical sketches put the contributions of more than 30 masters into context.
The author presents many new insights--for example, regarding the origins of the Ponziani Opening, the Dutch Defense and the Petroff Defense. French star La Bourdonnais used other sources for almost every part of his…
This book was my biggest surprise of the year! This lovely color hardback gathers together the chess-themed artwork of chess player, arbiter, and artist Galina Satonina.
In particular, I loved Satonina’s depiction of typical chess situations such as “The Fork” (when two pieces are attacked at the same time) or “Time Trouble” (when a player is struggling to complete all his moves within the given time) which demonstrate a true affinity with the game.
Her paintings just spring into my mind every time something like that happens on the board!
Galina Satonina (1905–2000) was the leading chess painter of the Soviet era. A multiple-time Kazan and Tatarstan ladies chess champion, she saw life as a game of chess, and her paintings speak the language of Caissa. She painted world champions and other famous players, ranging from early stars Philidor, Morphy and Anderssen, all the way through to Fischer, Karpov and Kasparov. Several of her paintings depict the chess pieces themselves and emotions felt during play, as well as different aspects of the game such as time-trouble and checkmate. Satonina’s works were exhibited at Soviet-era world championship matches. They were widely…
Computers have transformed modern chess and will continue to shape it in the future, but what can they tell us about our treasured chess past?Re-Engineering the Chess Classicsexamines 35 classic chess games – some well-known, some hitherto hidden treasures – with the help of the world’s strongest chess engines.
The result is a mixture of wonder at the skill of players born 100 or more years ago and awe at the inexhaustibility of the game of chess - the engines demonstrating that wondrous new strategies and insights are still waiting to be found even in the best-known classics.
The book is both a series of accessible chess lessons on all aspects of the game and a celebration of chess history!
