2010: CHESS ODDITIES

Author: Alex Dunne

Thinker's Press (2003)

214 pages

$18.95

Reviewed by Joshua Anderson

CHESS ODDITIES was written by Alex Dunne and published by Thinker's Press in 2003. The back of the book states, in the tradition of that great chess author, Irving Chernev. While it may be in the tradition of Chernev, it won't be mistaken for Chernev's work anytime soon.
  
This book is divided into ten chapters. Two of these chapters are written by Dunne (it is unclear if he wrote or just collected most of the rest of the book) and they are by far the best. In the first chapter Dunne explains the 5 Most Instructive Games in History. Picking out the most instructive games is like picking out the most beautiful girls; it is all in the eye of the beholder. Whether or not the reader agrees with his picks, they are instructive and he adeptly demonstrates how a particular concept, such as the isolated queen pawn, can affect a game from beginning to end. Unlike many other sections of the book, these games are thoroughly annotated.
  
The fourth chapter demonstrates the evolution of a single variation of the Ruy Lopez. Though some would argue that the chapter is largely irrelevant to those who never play the opening or anything similar too it, it provides a wonderful showing of the evolution of an idea and how ideas in the opening can change over time. Again, this chapter is thoroughly annotated and demonstrates Dunne's ability to instruct and bring the beauty of the game to the reader's attention.
  
The rest of the book suffers from a lack of explanation or context and some really bizarre choices of inclusion that fail to make logical sense. It also has some simple sloppiness and proofreading errors.
  
The lack of context for items sometimes occurs for whole chapters. For instance, Chapter 2, a random group of short stories with only the common theme of chess tying them together makes no reference to where the stories come from or who wrote them. For all the reader knows, Dunne may have written them himself (though he makes no claims to have done so and they are of varying literary styles.) If the publisher can take a page to discuss typeface it certainly seems that they could have put some sort of reference in the book explaining where the stories came from or at least who wrote them. The most common lack of context is exemplified by the Tverskaia - Belakovskaia game on page 96. This game contains no notes about the game or of the players and no explanation at all as to why it is one of the 2010 oddities. The game itself, from the 1996 U.S. Women's Championship, while well played, does not involve anything that is not found in many games in most any women's tournament.
  
There are many choices for this book that left the reviewer quite puzzled. Are five annotated games, the best games of World Champions, historical notes about the growing strength of computers, and quotes about how to become a better player, really oddities? There are numerous quotes in Chapter Eight, Trivia and Assorted Stuff, but the whole of Chapter Ten is devoted to random chess quotes. Why is the game chosen as Kasparov's worst -- a game that he didn't play the first five moves of? Chapter Three is devoted to twenty recent short games, but has three games that ended because of off the board concerns and several that were cases of top echelon grandmasters making mistakes that would embarrass a Class player. Surely more interesting games could have been found. Dunne selects one player as a World Champion on the basis of seven moves of one game and the argument that no one else s play could be found. Lack of evidence is not proof of anything.
  
Finally, there is the matter of proofreading. Certainly, everyone makes mistakes, but some are more excusable than others. If the author goes through the trouble to place a diagram into a game just to show what a two-hundred move game looks like, (p. 122) then the diagram should show that position, but it does not (white's king is pictured on e6 not d6.) Later on (p. 186), when providing a mathematic solution (without explanation of how it is arrived at) to the question of how many squares are on a chess board, the author provides calculations that clearly are not correct, so the reader is left not only with an incorrect formula, but no explanation of how to create the right one.
  
While it is possible to argue that some of the faults the reviewer has with CHESS ODDITIES are a matter of taste -- and there are a few good things about the book -- the problems of lack of explanation or context, combined with strange choices that are difficult to defend, make it impossible for me to recommend this book.