Reshevsky's Best Games - Volume 2

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant!
Review: My hardcover of this called, "How Chess Games are Won," and this book lives up to its title. People say that Capablanca had a crystal clarity to his play. To me, Reshevsky had this ability as well, but unlike Capa, he had a real gift for annotating chess as well. Here are 59 of his best games from the second half of his career, when he was a fully mature adult and player. This is a rare games collection where every single game is crucial to me. Much of this is because I aspire to precisely Reshevsky's opening repertoire, playing 1. d4 as white, and Indians and the Sicilian as black. Basically every game in this book is in those openings. Reshevsky is a tremendous annotator. He does not aim too high or low, but simply explains what is going on, in a manner that instructs, but more importantly in a manner that heightens my interest in the game. How many authors can do this? I have games collections written by each of the following players: Tarrasch, Tartakower, Capablanca, Alekhine, Timman, Kasparov, Karpov, Shirov, Botvinnik, Smyslov, Taimanov, Polugayevsky, Averbakh, Fischer, Euwe, Fine, and others. Over time, I notice that undoubtedly I spend the most time with my Reshevsky collections, simply because they hold my interest and improve my play more than the others. Of course, I would not trade any of the others, and love them all. But these two Reshevsky books are my favorite. I diasgree with another reviewer who awarded this book 3 stars because he felt it was not up to the standard as "Reshevsky's Best Games," volume 1. Personally, I like volume 2 more, mostly because R. had begun playing the Sicilian, and we get lots of Sicilian games. It is true that there is less life-biography kind of stuff, but I sort of attribute that to his being an adult already at the start of this book. However, I feel strongly that it is not fair to give this book 3 stars, compared to the drivel out there that gets 3 and more stars. To each his own, but I felt compelled to inform chess book lovers out there that this one is definitely worth tracking down. (I have the beatiful hardcover Pittman edition from 1973)

Rating:
Summary: Not really a "best games" collection.
Review: This book is a reprint of Reshevsky's 1962 text "How Chess Games Are Won". It is a collection of Reshevsky's columns from the '50s and early '60s, assembled together under the editorship of Kenneth Harkness in the guise of an instructional volume. The columns, each of which features a Reshevsky game with the GM's brief introduction and laconic notes, are gathered into broad, thematic groupings such as "Inferior Openings", etc., that the author or editor decided best reflected the key characteristic enabling Reshevsky to have won the game.

Accordingly, while the games are generally interesting and have instructional value, anyone expecting an autobiographical collection of the quality of "Reshevsky on Chess" (a.k.a. "Reshevsky's Best Games of Chess" or "Reshevsky's Best Games Vol. 1") is bound to be sorely disappointed. For there is a complete absence of biography from this volume as Reshevsky and Harkness left it; neither is there much attempt to provide context or chronology to link, explain, or enrich the games of the individual columns. Reshevsky, to put it mildly, was not a sparkling or engaging writer, but his extremely simple style could occasionally prove quite serviceable in the composition of an instructional potboiler, of the sort that "How Chess Games Are Won" was intended to be.

Further, despite the publisher's claims (in the back cover blurb) of the book's chronicling "victories over Botvinnik, Keres, and Fischer", one will not actually find any Reshevsky-Fischer contests whatever in this book, while the Botvinnik and Keres games one will find are not part of Reshevsky's text, but have been appended with minimal and scarcely useful notes by GM Ray Keene by way an "appreciation" of Reshevsky tacked on to the front of the book in lieu of a solid biographical or historical introduction.

In short, while "Reshevsky's Best Games - Volume 2" does have some interest as a collection of columns and individual games by perhaps the second-greatest player in American chess history, I believe the publisher could have invested their resources more wisely by reprinting any of several dozen worthier books than this. But, if they really wanted to reprint precisely this Reshevsky text, they should have published it under its original title rather than give the false impression that the volume was either a biographical collection or specifically a best games collection. Because, in reality, it is neither.