There's nothing like a great games collection. Vishy Anand's My Best Games of Chess was one of the first three books that I reviewed. I and just about everyone else praised the book for both presentation and contents, and it subsequently won the BCF Book of the Year Award. This edition has been expanded sufficiently to tempt those who own the first edition to reinvest. Those who didn't get around to reading the original have a real treat in store.

As I begin to look through this edition, I do think that it needs a longer introduction to, for example, explain what material has been added (if only to specify which game number), how his career has developed, what his thoughts are as he looks back, what his expectations are, and so forth. Either he or his collaborator John Nunn could have bragged a bit about the addition of 100 new pages, discussed whether the notes to the earlier games have been revised, talked about what Nunn's role was, and so forth. Quite apart from any introduction, it might have been nice for Anand to occasionally give us a story about his life away from the board; although to be fair, this was not a feature of the first edition either.

The essence of Anand's book resides in the games and annotations. The original version's great appeal rested largely with its clear and relatively simple commentary, and of course its outstanding games. I think that the extra 17 games in this edition are equally attractive; and that for the most part, Anand retains the balance between verbal explanation and analysis that is pretty or essential for our understanding. Many of the notes have appeared elsewhere, e.g., in Informant or New in Chess Magazine. Perhaps for that reason, there is an occasional tendency to analyze positions in tremendous detail, e.g., the analytical note to move 17 in Game 42 goes on for 2.5 pages; and both games 53 and 56 have one note of about 1.5 pages with two others approaching a page in length. There is an awfully "Fritzy" feel to such analyses, and one wonders how many readers will bother to work their way through them. Of course, one needn't do so to enjoy the play. My own feeling is that this was never meant to be a technical book along the lines of, say, Igor Stohl's wonderful Instructive Chess Masterpieces; and its games don't require such intensive scrutiny.

My Best Games is obviously an improved version of the original in that one gets even more high-quality material. It's also nice to have a single source at hand that covers the whole of Anand's chess career. I played through every added game (on a real board with real pieces, something I don't get around to much these days), rediscovering how strong a player Anand is and what complicated struggles take place on the top levels. For those who learn from and enjoy games collections (most of us) and who don't already own the first edition, this book is almost a compulsory purchase. For those who do have the original, it comes down to whether you find enough of value here to justify a new purchase. Then factors may enter into the decision such as your budget for chess books or interest in contemporary players. At any rate, this was a first-class book when it appeared and is now even better.

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