An unexamined life is not worth living.

Saturday, October 15, 2016

Book Review – Learn from the Legends: Chess Champions At Their Best

As a fan of chess books about history and personalities, I found Mikhail Marin's books to be a sweet spot that merges the interesting stories with instructive material in the most seamless and natural way. In Learn from the Legends: Chess Champions At Their Best, by virtue of the author discussing each player's favourite type of positions or material balance - the reader gets to see how subtle superiority in understanding of those positions allowed great champions (Rubinstein, Alekhine, Tal and others) to outplay their opponents again and again. As the patterns are well explained the reader cannot help, but want to pursue each topic in their own games and study. The book has a lot of deep analysis, but one does not feel overwhelmed with variations because they are all tied together with ideas that the author is consistently trying to illustrate. Highly recommended!

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PS. In fact this approach of finding themes in games of top several top players is quite a popular inspirations for chess books, and I used a similar idea for my book The Break - Learn From Schlechter, Botvinnik and Kramnik where I explore the topic of unexpected pawn breaks and sacrifices.

The Break - Learn From Schlechter, Botvinnik and Kramnik 

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