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Batsford

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Two Game Collections from Batsford Chess Book/CD Reviews

Test Your Chess

From Mark Weeks,
Your Guide to Chess.
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The Bottom Line

(May 2005) 'Test Your Chess with GM Daniel King'; Batsford/Sterling; March 2005; 240 pages. • Match wits with the world's greatest players of the late 1990s and early 2000s. You take the side of the winner and predict all the moves (except the opening). The format is often called 'solitaire chess' and is a good way to understand a master's thinking. • Contains 20 games, thoroughly annotated using figurine algebraic notation. All games but one were played between 1996 and 2004.
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Pros
  • 20 well chosen, instructive games by the best players in the world (circa 2000).
  • The notes, combining concrete analysis with verbal assessments, are ideal for intermediate players.
  • Opening moves are given without comment and without having to guess the player's moves.
  • Profiles of the players are by another world class player who knows many of his peers personally.
  • Some positions ask what you would do if the opponent had played differently.
Cons
  • Somewhat clumsy as a solitaire book; 'what if your opponent had played otherwise' breaks the rhythm.
  • No index of players, opponents, or openings.

Description

  • Introduction explaining the point scoring system.
  • One chapter per game; each chapter has
  • - an introduction to the personality and style of the winner,
  • - a sample position or two from the winner's other games,
  • - the solitaire game with extensive notes, and
  • - a conclusion on what you should should have learned from playing through and studying the game.
  • The first 15 games cover the top-15 players on the April 2004 FIDE rating list.
  • 13 games were analyzed especially for the book; other games were first published in chess magazines.

Guide Review - Test Your Chess

Fifteen games by Kasparov, Kramnik, Anand, Leko, Topalov, Svidler, Morozevich, Adams, J.Polgar, Ponomariov, Grischuk, Ivanchuk, Shirov, Short, and Bareev. The other games are a hard fought draw, a brevity, a computer game (Deep Blue - Kasparov, Philadelphia 1996, 1-0), an overlooked oldie, and a modern game between two less known players. • There are 100 points available for each game. Your score places you in seven rankings from 'Grandmaster' down to 'Anyone for tennis?'. The author sometimes deduct points for blunders, e.g. 'deduct half your score if you greedily grabbed a pawn' (game 6). • We played through two of the games strictly respecting the solitaire format. One game we played alone; our score was in the same range corresponding to our FIDE rating. The other game we let chess playing software calculate to depth 10 or 11 and took the first move in the list as the predicted move. The computer performed at the same level that we had performed. • We predict that if you spend an hour playing through each of these games as the author intended, your chess understanding and your playing strength will improve.
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