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THE 100 BEST CHESS GAMES of the 20th CENTURY, RANKED
Author: Andy Soltis
McFarland & Company Publishing (2006)
www.mcfarlandpub.com
271 pages
$30.00
Reviewed by IM John Donaldson
McFarland & Company Publishing has recently released a paperback edition of its 2000 hardback, THE 100 BEST CHESS GAMES of the 20th CENTURY, RANKED by Andy Soltis. The idea of a book of the best games of all time has been done before. Think of THE GOLDEN TREASURE OF CHESS by Wellmuth, Chernev’s THE GOLDEN DOZEN (in paperback, the title is TWELVE GREAT PLAYERS and THEIR BEST GAMES) and the excellent A GNAT MAY DRINK: ONE HUNDRED ANNOTATED GAMES of CHESS FROM 1900-1999 by Jonathan Hilton. The latter, published in 1999, is a particularly good book to compare the present volume with, but before that, comment should be made on the criteria for selection and ranking system devised by Soltis. To quote from the publisher’s blurb:
How does one determine the “best” chess games? What one may see as brilliant, another may see as simply necessary. Like some art lovers, chess fans claim that they know a good game when they see it, and that they know better from good. But “best?” How is this articulated? This book, itself a work of art, is brought together by the use of five criteria: the overall aesthetics (clever and relentless are insufficient qualities); the originality (e.g., not yet another white knight sacrifice in a Sicilian); the level of opposition (the loser played very well); the soundness (i.e., are the moves refutable with perfect play?), accuracy (few of the moves are second-best), and difficulty (the winner overcame major obstacles) of the game; and finally the overall breadth and depth (one wants a series of sparkling ideas, with no dry patches).
The 100 best games were taken from an initial field of about 7,000 played from 1900 through 1999 that had already gained some attention in magazines, books and periodicals. Three hundred games were then selected that appeared to have features consistent with the criteria. The 300 games were evaluated with scores – points given for each category of criteria. The games were then ranked, one to 100, by the score they received. No attempt was made to balance the selection according to period, nationality of players or opening. Also included is a chapter on the most overrated games of the twentieth century and one on games that would have made the list if…
All the selection criteria aside, I think that personal choice undeniably plays a large role. If you like who or what is the greatest arguments you may take the rankings to heart. I suspect most readers will prefer to play over the games and enjoy even more the introduction and chapters on overrated brilliancies and near misses. There the New York Post writer discusses the historical ideas of what constitutes a brilliancy.
The selection of games is weighted to the past. Contemporary greats like Anand, Shirov and Ivanchuk are each represented by a loss and there are no games by Kramnik. Karpov fans will not rejoice when they see their hero given with three losses and no wins. A different author might have selected Kramnik’s win over Malaniuk from the Moscow Olympiad in 1994, but I didn’t write this book!
The selection of games might be a matter of personal choice, but the notes to them are a different matter. Soltis has aimed his at a general audience. The annotations are mostly prose with variations sprinkled in. There are no new earth-shattering revelations changing the assessments of any of the games selected. By way of comparison, the well-known game Nezhmetdinov-Chernikov, USSR 1962, gets one and a half pages in THE 100 BEST CHESS GAMES of the 20th CENTURY, RANKED and four pages in A GNAT MAY DRINK: ONE HUNDRED ANNOTATED GAMES of CHESS FROM 1900-1999. Soltis does mention that Black has the resource ...Rh5! on moves 24-26 but Hinton goes well beyond this, presenting detailed analysis.
THE 100 BEST CHESS GAMES of the 20th CENTURY, RANKED is rounded out by 335 diagrams, an index of players and an index of openings by ECO codes. Like all McFarland publications the typesetting and binding are first rate. In conclusion, this is not one of the best books Andy Soltis has ever written (think SOVIET CHESS 1917-1991 or the biography on Marshall – both published by McFarland) but it’s not his worst either. Among the close to 100 books that Soltis has written, I would put it in the middle.
If you would like to purchase (or get more information about) one of Soltis’ greatest books, click on SOVIET CHESS 1971-1991
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