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Based on the reactions I saw at the tournament this weekend in Ottawa, not many people know about this book. So here's my review. Questions? Comments? Criticisms? Complaints? Write em here.
Canadian Chess New 2010 Yearbook
I have a confession to make: I don't really read the CFC e-zine. It arrives in my Inbox, I scan it for five or ten minutes, then I delete it. I don't even download the accompanying PGN file. Tony Ficzere took on the mammoth project of converting all (with a few minor exceptions) of the content from the 2010 e-zines that were e-mailed CFC members that year. This is really an enormous project and I will be shocked if anyone ever tries this again. Thanks, Tony. Many people who either didn't receive, or didn't read, the e-zines of that year are going to enjoy this book.
Let's start with the things I really liked about this book.
It's a weighty tome at more than 500 pages so there's content to read for weeks. Formatting was good, it's not too "squished" with plenty of space for margin notes but not so spread out that space was wasted. In his Introduction Tony mentions a problem with the diagrams, but to me they looked fine. Even if I have seen pictures of players hunched over chessboards or getting trophies thousands of times I still like them a lot. There's about 100 photos in here and their subjects are varied. There are a couple of diagrams whose accompanying captions appear to be truncated prematurely but that's a minor quibble.
There is a pretty wide variety of visiting titled players who have made "one off" contributions, which is fantastic. My favourite was GM Mikhalevski's report on Raja Panjwani and Shiyam Thavandiran at the World Junior. From my reading I got the sense that the job of a coach at a tournament like this is rewarding, but not easy. There was also some more local talent who had interesting things to say. A good example is NM Michael Humphrey's essay on modern tournament etiquette (playing on in lost positions, agreeing to short draws, "zero tolerance" with respect to lateness, etc.) and the unintended(?) consequences of these changes. Thought-provoking stuff.
Of the regular contributors, my favourite articles were by Lawrence Day. Lawrence has a writing (and playing) style that cannot be emulated. He can tell a great chess story while introducing information in a way that is accessible to all readers and provides insights that are useful from 1400s all the way up to at least IM. There was some autobiographical material, but I would have liked to have seen more as well as more of his own games. Something like "Lawrence's Adventures" or "Days of Yore" outlining his chess adventures from the beginning to the present, perhaps as preview to a book or books? Other than Kevin Spraggett, I think there's no active Canadian player whose book I would be more eager to buy.
Deen Hergott is a strong player and even better writer, BUT needs to focus on Canada. Articles about matches and tournaments that ended weeks or even months earlier in some other part of the world is not very interesting, especially to anyone who follows chess online and knows about Chessbase.com, TWIC, etc. Maybe he can be convinced to resurrect his Apprentice's Workshop format from the physical magazines and analyse contributions from 1400-2000 rated players, who are the vast majority of readers of this e-zine.
Stephen Wright contributes regularly about historical chess Canadiana. I'm betting that some (many?) people who buy this book are going to fast-forward through his stuff and zip over to more recent fare. That would be a big mistake. Most of his information was new to me, and he must have done a lot of research to piece together things like simultaneous games and results from more than a half-century ago. I particularly liked that he reported on things that were: 1) important (e.g. World Champion comes to town); 2) not reported elsewhere (i.e. not something you can easily find in a book or magazine elsewhere); and 3) had plenty of human touch to it.
I had never heard of NM Alex Yam, so was curious what he had to say. I liked his stuff straight off. He's big on explanation and tackles items that you don't see written about very much, but which I personally think are very important: how to adjust to your opponent's style; how your opponents adjust to your style and what to do about that; how to play bad/lost, good/winning positions; what to do against higher-rated (perhaps even scary?) opponents, etc. I get the sense that Mr. Yam believes that chess is more than simply solving spatial problems. It's also a game about people played with pieces, if I can paraphrase a certain poker saying. I can't argue with that.
Okay, this book isn't perfect and there were some weaknesses, at least in my opinion. First, the editing is very sloppy in places. Lots of misspellings, even of common chess names. For example, "Nadjorf" appeared repeatedly in one particular article. Not a big deal, I guess, but a bit off-putting.
NM Kevin Pacey has put together a string of articles outlining his interpretations of various openings (e.g. "Mainstream Praxis: French Winawer"). First, if someone is going to write an article about their experiences in an opening I want them to have a fair amount of experience in this opening. Kevin has played the French a long time, so he's good there.
Next I want to know how they learned to play the opening in question. For example, let's say you start looking at games between strong (2600+ if possible) players on TWIC or ChessBase then play dozens of practice blitz games vs people and maybe computers. You get a rough sense of what variations are dangerous and which are just lame, which variations you are most comfortable with and which give you trouble. Maybe you buy a book on the opening and reference it after every loss, or close call. As you get more experience in the opening you stop looking at the new stuff and go more with your own intuition, which of course is getting better as you play more games in that opening. Eventually (if you're like me) you stop looking much at developments in "your" opening and almost totally rely upon your own experiences to formulate your future play.
The point is I would like to know this stuff, or however someone else develops their repertoire. The moves of the actual games for such an article without any of the above is just useless to me. There doesn't appear to be any chronology (as far as I could tell) and I couldn't tell you whether say Game X had an impact on how Kevin played Game X+1. Without some sort of premise more interesting than "Here's a bunch of good results I had vs Opening Blah" I give up and just move on. So I shall.
Every month there were local events reported and they made it into the book. I don't think there is much need for local events to get this treatment unless there is something special about the event (e.g. GM participates). If anyone cares what happened in some local tournament in Town X in even five years, I guess they can consult the local/provincial website or do a search of the CFC website to find the crosstable. I think this is the weakest part of the book.
Finally, I thought there was a pretty serious lack of diversity in terms of authors of articles. I did a quick count and found that Messrs Day, Hergott and Pacey represented roughly 50% of the articles in the book! That's rather high. It would be nice to see contributions from veterans like Kevin Spraggett and Brian Hartman and even more from younger players like Eric Hansen, Nikolay Noritsyn and Anton Kovalyov (and many others in this category).
Anyway, I think this book is generally good and I think Tony deserves a big hand for putting this together. I give it 3.5/5 stars.
Canadian Chess New 2010 Yearbook
I have a confession to make: I don't really read the CFC e-zine. It arrives in my Inbox, I scan it for five or ten minutes, then I delete it. I don't even download the accompanying PGN file. Tony Ficzere took on the mammoth project of converting all (with a few minor exceptions) of the content from the 2010 e-zines that were e-mailed CFC members that year. This is really an enormous project and I will be shocked if anyone ever tries this again. Thanks, Tony. Many people who either didn't receive, or didn't read, the e-zines of that year are going to enjoy this book.
Let's start with the things I really liked about this book.
It's a weighty tome at more than 500 pages so there's content to read for weeks. Formatting was good, it's not too "squished" with plenty of space for margin notes but not so spread out that space was wasted. In his Introduction Tony mentions a problem with the diagrams, but to me they looked fine. Even if I have seen pictures of players hunched over chessboards or getting trophies thousands of times I still like them a lot. There's about 100 photos in here and their subjects are varied. There are a couple of diagrams whose accompanying captions appear to be truncated prematurely but that's a minor quibble.
There is a pretty wide variety of visiting titled players who have made "one off" contributions, which is fantastic. My favourite was GM Mikhalevski's report on Raja Panjwani and Shiyam Thavandiran at the World Junior. From my reading I got the sense that the job of a coach at a tournament like this is rewarding, but not easy. There was also some more local talent who had interesting things to say. A good example is NM Michael Humphrey's essay on modern tournament etiquette (playing on in lost positions, agreeing to short draws, "zero tolerance" with respect to lateness, etc.) and the unintended(?) consequences of these changes. Thought-provoking stuff.
Of the regular contributors, my favourite articles were by Lawrence Day. Lawrence has a writing (and playing) style that cannot be emulated. He can tell a great chess story while introducing information in a way that is accessible to all readers and provides insights that are useful from 1400s all the way up to at least IM. There was some autobiographical material, but I would have liked to have seen more as well as more of his own games. Something like "Lawrence's Adventures" or "Days of Yore" outlining his chess adventures from the beginning to the present, perhaps as preview to a book or books? Other than Kevin Spraggett, I think there's no active Canadian player whose book I would be more eager to buy.
Deen Hergott is a strong player and even better writer, BUT needs to focus on Canada. Articles about matches and tournaments that ended weeks or even months earlier in some other part of the world is not very interesting, especially to anyone who follows chess online and knows about Chessbase.com, TWIC, etc. Maybe he can be convinced to resurrect his Apprentice's Workshop format from the physical magazines and analyse contributions from 1400-2000 rated players, who are the vast majority of readers of this e-zine.
Stephen Wright contributes regularly about historical chess Canadiana. I'm betting that some (many?) people who buy this book are going to fast-forward through his stuff and zip over to more recent fare. That would be a big mistake. Most of his information was new to me, and he must have done a lot of research to piece together things like simultaneous games and results from more than a half-century ago. I particularly liked that he reported on things that were: 1) important (e.g. World Champion comes to town); 2) not reported elsewhere (i.e. not something you can easily find in a book or magazine elsewhere); and 3) had plenty of human touch to it.
I had never heard of NM Alex Yam, so was curious what he had to say. I liked his stuff straight off. He's big on explanation and tackles items that you don't see written about very much, but which I personally think are very important: how to adjust to your opponent's style; how your opponents adjust to your style and what to do about that; how to play bad/lost, good/winning positions; what to do against higher-rated (perhaps even scary?) opponents, etc. I get the sense that Mr. Yam believes that chess is more than simply solving spatial problems. It's also a game about people played with pieces, if I can paraphrase a certain poker saying. I can't argue with that.
Okay, this book isn't perfect and there were some weaknesses, at least in my opinion. First, the editing is very sloppy in places. Lots of misspellings, even of common chess names. For example, "Nadjorf" appeared repeatedly in one particular article. Not a big deal, I guess, but a bit off-putting.
NM Kevin Pacey has put together a string of articles outlining his interpretations of various openings (e.g. "Mainstream Praxis: French Winawer"). First, if someone is going to write an article about their experiences in an opening I want them to have a fair amount of experience in this opening. Kevin has played the French a long time, so he's good there.
Next I want to know how they learned to play the opening in question. For example, let's say you start looking at games between strong (2600+ if possible) players on TWIC or ChessBase then play dozens of practice blitz games vs people and maybe computers. You get a rough sense of what variations are dangerous and which are just lame, which variations you are most comfortable with and which give you trouble. Maybe you buy a book on the opening and reference it after every loss, or close call. As you get more experience in the opening you stop looking at the new stuff and go more with your own intuition, which of course is getting better as you play more games in that opening. Eventually (if you're like me) you stop looking much at developments in "your" opening and almost totally rely upon your own experiences to formulate your future play.
The point is I would like to know this stuff, or however someone else develops their repertoire. The moves of the actual games for such an article without any of the above is just useless to me. There doesn't appear to be any chronology (as far as I could tell) and I couldn't tell you whether say Game X had an impact on how Kevin played Game X+1. Without some sort of premise more interesting than "Here's a bunch of good results I had vs Opening Blah" I give up and just move on. So I shall.
Every month there were local events reported and they made it into the book. I don't think there is much need for local events to get this treatment unless there is something special about the event (e.g. GM participates). If anyone cares what happened in some local tournament in Town X in even five years, I guess they can consult the local/provincial website or do a search of the CFC website to find the crosstable. I think this is the weakest part of the book.
Finally, I thought there was a pretty serious lack of diversity in terms of authors of articles. I did a quick count and found that Messrs Day, Hergott and Pacey represented roughly 50% of the articles in the book! That's rather high. It would be nice to see contributions from veterans like Kevin Spraggett and Brian Hartman and even more from younger players like Eric Hansen, Nikolay Noritsyn and Anton Kovalyov (and many others in this category).
Anyway, I think this book is generally good and I think Tony deserves a big hand for putting this together. I give it 3.5/5 stars.
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