Chess no. 398
PIIILIDOR
Black
5 uLli
A. Anderssen (Aufgaben, 1842). White to play and mate in four moves; solution next week.
Solution to no. 397 (ten Cate); Q - K 7, threat R x P. 1 . . Kt - K 3 ch; 2 R - Q 4. 1 . . . Kt else. ch; 2 Q - K 5. 1 . Q x Q; 2 R x P. 1 . . . P x P; 2 Kt - R 6. Good cross-checker.
Reading about chess
A correspondent (a weak player, but very interested in the game) wrote to me recently asking me, more or less, what to read in order to find out what chess was all about; why do people play, what part does it play in society, where does it come from and where is it going to? Well, what is worth reading? Here is my short list of books; I would be very interested in readers' additions to the list.
One can hardly omit H. J. R. Murray's Short History of Chess (Clarendon Press)—if only for the names of the openings of the Muslim game; The Torrent, The Sword, The Richly Girdled— and how agreeable to open with the Double Mujannah (I P - K B 3, P - K B 3; 2 P - K B 4, P -K B 4). Richard Reti's classic Modern Ideas in Chess (Bell)—if you can get it—is a beautifully written book and if you want to see chess as an art in relation to other arts you cannot do better than this. D. L. Richards's Soviet Chess: Chess and Communism in the USSR (Clarendon Press 25s) is an admirable picture of chess in a country where the game is a major activity—where the position of a great chess master is a sort of combination of the positions of Fred Hoyle and Bobby Charl- ton. Frank Brady's Profile of a Genius: The Life and Games of Bobby Fischer (Nicholas Kaye 21s) shows the other side of the picture—the oddball genius, the `loner,' in a society in which chess is a freakish activity; it is not quite so hard for a chess player as for an artist because the chess player can prove the correctness of his ideas by victory—still, I think a book like this makes one think of someone like Van Gogh. The best fictional chess player is Luzhin in Nabokov's The Defence —the obsessional player who seeks in chess what has escaped him in life. The recently published Master Prim by J. W. Ellison (Macdonald 25s) is readable but so closely based on Fischer that I would prefer just to read about Fischer undis- guised. Chess Pieces by Norman Knight (recently republished by Chess, Sutton Coldfield 35s) is a marvellous book for browsing in; when you win you can expand your ego further with Guillim's `Chess is a game of noble exercise for the mind, as requiring much forecast and understanding'— when you lose you can cry sour grapes with Shaw : `Chess . . . is a foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are doing some- thing very clever, when they are only wasting their time.'
Finally, two highly technical books but so written that you can get their flavour even if you can't understand the content. Chess Problems: Introduction to an Art (Lipton, Matthews and Rice: Faber 42s) opens up an understanding of the problemist's art—very different from that of
the player. And The Art of the Middle Game (Keres and Kotov: Penguin) is a superb demonstration of the difference between the great master's chess and that of the amateur; it will induce a salutary humility in the mind of any ordinary player- s good companion book to The Road to Chess Mastery (Euwe and Meiden) recently reviewed in this column.
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