Counter Gambits by T.D. Harding; Dover © 1979; Price $9.00 What a delight! 220 PACKED pages. Includes 18 page chapter written 2001. Superb format: long-algebraic, bold type for game moves; short-algebraic, light type for analysis. Perfect diagrams. There are three types of gambits by Black: those which are theoretically sound, those which are risky but [...]

Chess Master vs. Chess Amateur by Max Euwe and Walter Meiden Dover price $10. Please order from me – MINIMUM ORDER $20. See Dover list with reviews HERE. Mostly a good book but Euwe made the worst possible mistake, saying 1 PK4 PQ4; 2 PxP PQB3?; 3 PxP NxP is playable, when it is actually [...]

HELP! I have written to every prison in the State of Washington asking if they want any chess sets. A prison official called and said they can use forty sets. The second prison official that called said they can use forty sets. That’s the way it goes. Forty tournament size solid plastic sets and forty [...]

The 1948 World Championship Tournament was reported in CHESS by Harry Golombek, who implied that Paul Keres was forced to lose four games in a row to Botvinnik. Keres wrote a book called Sto Partii which was published in three volumes, but he did not mention the 1948 Tournament. William Lombardy reviewed Golombek’s book and [...]

2001 Chess Oddities by Alex Dunne © 2003 “No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted by any means.” THANK GOD! This is the worst collection of trash I have ever seen! There are HUNDREDS of mistakes. “Paul Morphy died of a stroke while taking a hot bath.” On July 10, 1884 in [...]

Several Masters are playing a consultation game. Kasparaov says: “The weak point in our opponent’s position is g7, therefore we should play R-g1.” Direct attack. Spassky says: “yes, we should attack g7 but let’s play N-d4 first, then we can attack g7 with N-e6 or N-f5, either before or aftter R-g1.” Combination. Karpov says: “Those [...]

Book Review: Bobby Fischer’s Conquest of the World Chess Championship by Reuben Fine “The psychology and tactics of the title match” David McKay Co, November 1973 Review by James Schroeder published in 1974 For several years one of the best analysts in the world, Fine degenerated rapidly after he quit playing chess in 1952. In [...]

Soviet Chess 1917 – 1991 by Andrew Soltis, 2000, McFarland and Company Soltis is notorious for writing the worst researched books in history. This has so many factual errors it is worthless. It is very poorly written and abounds with inane comments such as “The tragedy of Spassky’s brief reign was that it came just [...]

New York 1936: The First Modern United States Chess Championship by John Hilbert and Peter Lahde review by James Schroeder In 1985 I discovered that the John White Dept. of the Cleveland Public Library had a box containing the original game scores of the 1936 U.S. Chess Championship Tournament. So I hand-copied all of them [...]

From behind the Iron Curtain and out of the deep freezer of the Cold War emerged a cold-blooded chess assassin, a man of iron will, iron discipline, iron technique: Mikhail Moiseyevich Botvinnik, World Champion 1948-1957, 1958-1960, and 1961-61, dominated the chess world after WWII in a way that no doubt made his political and ideological [...]