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Summary: Beautiful and creative chess masterpieces!
Review: If you want to to play creative and energetic chess, if you want to leave the oppenent in shock and the spectators in awe, this is the book for you. Alekhine had this uncanny ability to create positions that not only earned him great wins, but were also visually very satisfying to the spectators - with the fireworks, and shocking surprises sometimes when you least expected them. If people think chess is a long and boring game, give them this book, and they will love the game for their lifetimes. It's an excellent piece of work - even the mighty Kasparov drew his inspiration from the great Alekhine.
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Summary: Simply the best
Review: It's hard to praise this book too much. The games are exciting, the notes lucid and instructive, not weighted down with mechanically generated variations. (As Hubner's and Nunn's are, for example.) I've played through these games at least once a year since I was a B-player. As a master, I still learn a little more each time. There are some game collections which equal Alekhine's -- Botvinnik, Tal, the orginal edition Fischer -- but none surpass it.
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Summary: There is nothing better
Review: Look. This is plain and simple. There is not a collection of better annotated games out there, and for this price, how could you not buy it! The annotations will instruct you just as well as any middlegame book, and if you ask 10 masters if they think this is a good book, all 10 will say yes.
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Summary: There is nothing better
Review: No, I didn't know him, but this was one of the first chess books I ever owned. I lost it years ago, and have just ordered it again. I think there is something heavy and physical, brutal in Alekhine's play: more direct than Petrosian, less sparkling than Tal. Whatever--this is a fantastic book. I hate descriptive notation like any lazy s.o.b.; here's my suggestion: with a pencil write the algebraic notation just above the old form notation. This also forces you to concentrate on the game more. Every chess player should be very familiar with Alekhine, and this is a great book to do just that.
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Summary: Fond Memories of Alekhine
Review: No, I didn't know him, but this was one of the first chess books I ever owned. I lost it years ago, and have just ordered it again. I think there is something heavy and physical, brutal in Alekhine's play: more direct than Petrosian, less sparkling than Tal. Whatever--this is a fantastic book. I hate descriptive notation like any lazy s.o.b.; here's my suggestion: with a pencil write the algebraic notation just above the old form notation. This also forces you to concentrate on the game more. Every chess player should be very familiar with Alekhine, and this is a great book to do just that.
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Summary: Excellent collection of masterpieces
Review: This book is actually two separate books, bound together in one volume. Considering the price, this book is an absolute bargain if you are looking for a good collection of annotated games.Even though the price is very low, the games annotated in this collection are incredible. Alekhine spent a great deal of time and care to annotate the games and to point out blunders, side lines, and highlights of each position. His annotations are clear and approachable and will appeal to the novice and master alike. Plodding through these games on an actually board is a pleasure as well. The book is in descriptive notation instead of algebraic; if you can handle this, and you want a collection of very well-annotated games by one of the very best players of all time, then this book will fill the need beautifully.
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Summary: Learn Chess from One of the Greats
Review: This is a wonderful collection of games from the legendary world champion. Aleknine sheds light on all phases of the game: opening, middlegame, and endgame. His unsurpassed combinative ability is on display together with the positional thinking and combative attitude that made him a winner with an attacking style. I am a hobby type player and found the annotations far easier to understand than any other game collection. This book really helped me improve by showing that one can recover from poor moves in the opening or even middlegame miscalculations.
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Summary: Learn Chess from One of the Greats
Review: This is a wonderful collection of games from the legendary world champion. Aleknine sheds light on all phases of the game: opening, middlegame, and endgame. His unsurpassed combinative ability is on display together with the positional thinking and combative attitude that made him a winner with an attacking style. I am a hobby type player and found the annotations far easier to understand than any other game collection. This book really helped me improve by showing that one can recover from poor moves in the opening or even middlegame miscalculations.
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Summary: A World Champion's deeply annotated best games
Review: This is an inexpensive collection of 220 of the best games of Alexander Alekhine, fourth World Champion and one of the greatest attacking players in chess history. What makes this book worth studying is the annotations by Alekhine. Any top grandmaster's annotations to his own games are valuable study material, but Alekhine's notes are unusually instructive and his analysis is impressively deep and thorough. As with all Dover editions this book has high quality paper that won't turn brown in just a few years and sturdy binding that lays flat for easy study. But the sheer bulk of this volume will eventually cause the spine to crease with repeated use. I highly recommend this great classic to all aspiring chess players. If you just can't tolerate descriptive notation then get John Nunn's revised edition in algebraic. It's an abridged and corrected edition with additional games from Alekhine's later years, but it's more expensive and has fewer games.
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Summary: There are Certain Books the Serious Player Just Must Read:
Review: This is on of those books. Like My Sixty Memorable Games or My System, you just won't be able really to understand this game until you read it. Bottvinik thought that the study of Alekhine's (and Capablanca's) games should make up the backbone of one's chess learning. Yet don't think of this book as a mere obligatory read. The games are enchanting: You will find reading this book demanding, but you will also find it fun! The author of this book is one of the four or five greatest players of all time and it shows! His games, esp. those against Reti at Baden Baden, Rabinovich, and Nimzowitch, rank as some of the greatest ever played.
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