The Development of Chess Style

Rating:
Summary: A great book suitable to master and patzer alike
Review: I have been too frugal to go buy this revised edition of The Development of Chess Style, but have thumbed through a friend's copy, and like it very much. The text has been completely rewritten in algebraic notation and the diagrams are now placed where their positions occur in the text rather than in the middle of the page as in my old edition. The portion written by Euwe has only been subtly revised by Nunn through the use of unobtrusive footnotes. He completely rewrote the section on the Soviet school of chess and added sections on Fischer, Karpov, and Kasparov (as well as a few of Kasparov's most recent nemeses).

Rating:
Summary: Another great work from Nunn!
Review: John Nunn is another great chess author who is unashamed to call himself a fan of the game, and a fan of the players. This book is a very fascinating historical journey through several hundred years of chess games, including games and annotations. I don't know which I loved more: the games, or the text....great book!

Rating:
Summary: Another great work from Nunn!
Review: John Nunn is another great chess author who is unashamed to call himself a fan of the game, and a fan of the players. This book is a very fascinating historical journey through several hundred years of chess games, including games and annotations. I don't know which I loved more: the games, or the text....great book!

Rating:
Summary: A good book about different styles of play in chess
Review: There are a number of books that analyze games of 19th and 20th century Masters. One is Richard Reti's "Masters of the Chessboard." Another is the recent Mammoth book of the world's greatest chess games, which John Nunn co-authored. And there are others as well, including this one, originally written by World Champion Max Euwe and updated by John Nunn.

I think this book may be the most instructive of them. It has 61 games, 59 of which are annotated. But more than that, it has a 17-page description of the teachings of Wilhelm Steinitz (the first World Champion of chess). When I read the original version of this book, I had never seen a book by Steinitz, and I was not aware of some of the fundamentals of positional play. This book changed all that. It describes Steinitz's main elements of positional play: development, mobility, the center, king safety, weak squares, pawn structure, Q-side majority (with both Kings castled K-side), open files, two bishops, material advantage, and the need to convert temporary advantages to permanent ones at once (or lose them). And it gives some of Steinitz's games which illustrate these elements.

My only complaint with the book is that it did not spend a few more pages describing a little of the thinking of other chess strategists, such as Nimzovich, Reti, Larsen, or Benko. We see one Nimzovich game in which blockade plays a role, but we don't see much of his other ideas, such as overprotection. We see very little on the theory of playing a flank game in which one gives up the center and then plays against it. And I think the Benko gambit is just one example of another style of play that could have been included.

I recommend this book, especially to those who want to learn more about positional play.