MY ONE HUNDRED BEST GAMES
Author: Alexey Dreev
Chess Stars (2007)
300 pages (plus an 8 page insert of color photos)
$28.00
Reviewed by John Donaldson
My One Hundred Best Games by Alexey Dreev is everything you could want
in a game collection. There's lots of biographical material,
observations on what it's like to be one of the top players, very well
annotated games, a list of his most important tournaments and results,
and frameable color photographs.
Dreev starts out with almost twenty pages of biographical material
tracing his rise from a six-year-old novice growing up in
Zheleznovodsk, not far from the Caucasus' Mountains, to a Candidate for
the World Championship. Along the way he describes the two sides of
chess growing up in the Soviet Union. On the one hand he praises the
State support with funding for teachers, tournaments, training camps,
and an abundance of excellent cheap chess literature. On the other
hand, reading MY ONE HUNDRED BEST GAMES one can see how easy it would
have been for Dreev's career to turn out differently. In his late
teens, Dreev found himself at loose ends living in Moscow with no legal
right to do so and with his formal connection to the coach to whom he
credits molding him into a strong player -- Mark Dvoretsky -- coming to
an end. Fortunately, several breaks came his way and things worked out.
MY ONE HUNDRED BEST GAMES presents a vivid insiders look at chess life
in the former Soviet Union. Reading it one realizes it's no accident
that this country and Russia today produce so many strong players.
There's no question that then and now, chess is a popular and respected
activity on a level that doesn't exist in the West.
The biographical section ends around 1989 and what follows is the heart
of the book. One hundred well-annotated games covering some 270 pages
are almost all from Dreev's career after 1990 when he was emerging as a
world-class player.
Dreev has always had a small opening repertoire, with a result that
this book is in some ways a short course on playing the French,
Caro-Kann, and Semi-Slav as black and 1.d4 as white. Dreev has always
been noted for his excellent endgame technique and there are many fine
examples here. I found the annotations to the games to be of a very
high quality and his comments about the openings to be quite revealing.
All one hundred games are prefaced by one or two paragraph
introductions in which Dreev sets the background for the encounters.
These intros provide the biographical material for his career post 1989.
MY ONE HUNDRED BEST GAMES is a very nicely produced book printed on
good quality paper with a clear, easy to read two column format that is
neither too busy nor features too much white space. Diagrams average
about two per page. The 16 color photos are among the clearest and best
quality I've seen anywhere. If I can find any fault with this book, it
is that the translation from the Russian by GM Ermenkov is a little
awkward at times, but Dreev's meaning is always clear. This said, the
quality of the English is still much better than earlier efforts by
Chess Stars Publishing.
Click to buy (or get more information about) MY ONE HUNDRED BEST GAMES
