Paul Morphy and the Evolution of Chess Theory

Rating:
Summary: Shibut's excellent guide to Morphy!
Review: Thanks to a recent gift from two of my Internet students, I just received this book a few days ago. (Thanks guys!) However, I did not need much introduction to this book, as I already owned the original hard-back edition as well.

Paul Morphy was one of the greatest players who ever lived, statistically he dominated his generation in a fashion that Bobby Fischer or Garry Kasparov cannot touch.

This is a great book, probably one of the most carefully written books on Morphy that you will find. It has OVER 400 games played by Morphy. All of his serious tournament and match games, as well as other games as well. (Games at odds, simultaneous games, blindfold games, etc.)

Many of the games are carefully annotated, the author did a wonderful job here. Many of the mistakes that were made in earlier books are caught and corrected.

This is NOT the ultimate biography on Morphy, it concentrates almost exclusively on Morphy's chess. (Chapters on Morphy's Openings, Morphy's Endings, etc.) And while I do not agree with every conclusion that the author reached, I do think that this is a LAND-MARK book ... and one that fully deserved to be reprinted.

A few flaws, there are some obvious typo's in here. The diagrams in the Dover edition are not as clear as in the original hard-back book. Some of the pages have a grainy feel to them, a few pages in my book were not cut correctly and are slightly skewed.

Overall, I give this book 4 stars. If you want to get better, you HAVE to study Morphy's tactics. This is the book to do it with. I highly recommend this book, despite the publisher's flaws. (All the older books on Morphy were in English Standard Descriptive Notation, this is one of the only books on Morphy in algebraic.)


Rating:
Summary: By far the best book ever written on the great Paul Morphy.
Review: Finally a book that sets the record straight and puts Morphy in the proper context. If you are sick of chess anthologies that provide one or two of Morphy's skittles games and try to pass this off as indicative of the style and quality of 19th century chess, you are going to love this book. Mr. Shibut totally destroys the popular misconception that Morphy was the "missing link" between Anderssen and Steinitz. The concept that Wilhelm Steinitz enlightened the chess world with new and revolutionary ideas of positional play is shown to be utter nonsense. By analyzing Morphy's serious games as well as those of other great 19th century masters Mr. Shibut does a fine job of showing that Steinitz's "theories" offered little that was new to the understanding of chess at the time. The main theme of this book is that Morphy's strength was not due to some unique understanding of the game that was later articulated to the world by Wilhelm Steinitz. Paul Morphy was simply the best chess player of the 19th century. No more no less. I highly recommend this book to any serious student of the game.

Rating:
Summary: Nothing Special
Review: The quality of the writing is mediocre at best, and the author is clearly underqualified to do in-depth analysis of Morphy's games. The book is overpriced. Chris Ward's book may not be the last word on Morphy, but Ward's a better player and annotator than Shibut, and he has all the same games. Certainly the games are great, but Shibut adds little of interest to Morphy's games or to the story of his life.

Unless money is no object, you really need to think twice when considering the purchase of a high-priced book by an unknown player.

Rating:
Summary: Fascinating study of Morphy's play
Review: This book deserves to be re-printed. It's simply fascinating. Did Morphy really anticipate Steinitz? Did masters understand the "principle of early development" even before Morphy? Shibut has many interesting things to say about the evolution of chess, with reference to games and history for support. It's a fairly scholarly work, but not a dry one. I think a club-level chess player could learn a bit about chess from this book, while enjoying the lessons of history.

The meat of the book lies in the chapters comparing Morphy to a)Anderssen and the romantics, b)Steinitz, c)Barnes, who scored more points off him than anyone, and d)modern players (via Reti's assessments). Here you will find dozens of Morphy games with an unusual sort of annotation. Shibut does not give us many lines of variations, though he does sometimes point out tactical shots. More often, he assesses the postions qualitatively, showing us the sorts of plans that Morphy used. He also includes a great many references to the specific ideas and refutations of other authors, often pointing out THEIR mistakes. All of this gives you a sense that Morphy was both far ahead of his time in opening theory, and competitive with anyone alive today tactically.

The games in these chapters are (mainly) real struggles, rather than the dashing brilliancies we are used to seeing from Morphy. Shibut explains, "The effect of such presentations in countless beginner's texts has been to reduce Morphy's games to a collection of fables. Their moral is understood to be something about developing pieces, or the evils of chasing pawns in the opening. Whatever the pedagogical value of such portrayals, the games, so presented, can't help but appear shallow compared to modern grandmaster warfare." Shibut wants to show us what Morphy was really capable of when tested.

Then there is a fun chapter on Morphy's blunders, showing him to be fallible afterall. And there are examinations of his opening and endgame knowledge. After that comes a complete compilation, hundreds of complete (but completely un-annotated) Morphy games. This might be the most useless part of the book, since you could get at least sparse annotation from Sargeant.

One thing this book is great for is the section on games at odds. It amounts to a treatise on how to play such games, analyzing various opening strategies. If you want to play an odds game (eg remove the f-pawn before the game) against a much weaker opponent, I suggest that you take a look.

There are essays on Morphy by Steinitz, Znosko-Borovsky, and Alekhine. And finally, Shibut provides several indices: Morphy's openings, his opponents, and games not involving Morphy. However, there is no subject index, nor endnotes on sources.

After reading this book, I began to wonder how Morphy would fare against Fischer in a King's Gambit, each at their peak. Clearly, his chess was far deeper than I'd imagined.

One drawback: Although the notation is algebraic, it lacks capture (x) and check (+) symbols. This makes it very difficult to follow without a board.