I can't recommend Gufeld's Exploiting Small Advantages because I don't think that it's well written or useful to the average player. There are also a number of technical problems and poor analyses. Normally I would just forego comment upon it, but certain things about the book relate to my objections in my review of Gufeld's Chess: The Search for the Mona Lisa. By all accounts this is a revision of his 1985 (Batsford) work of the same title, with many chapter titles and quotes in common (I should add that I do not have a copy of the earlier book). This fact is not mentioned in the new version, just as with his "Mona Lisa." Is this just the publisher's fault? I don't think so; as an author, I can't imagine omitting the fact that I was revising an earlier work, nor do I think that other writers would do so! Such an omission is (to put it mildly) deceptive. And on a much more serious note, the question of Gufeld's plagiarism in this book has been brought up by more than one reviewer. Writing for Chess Horizons magazine, one of the best if not the best state magazines in the United States, Editor Mark Donlan points out two examples in which Gufeld blatantly lifts ChessBase textual commentary by both Daniel King and Alexander Baburin and inserts it in the book as his own writing, in one case with only a change of tense and in the other with a mere rearrangement of some of the sentences. This should not be acceptable. Without even having the redeeming factor of good chess material, I don't think that Exploiting Small Advantages deserves your consideration.

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