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Chessville
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Because chess is total information, chess players are encouraged to deny that any luck exists in chess compared to games of chance. This is silliness; every player has some lamentable story about being paired against a particularly tough opponent in a crucial game or getting too many blacks in an open tournament while the competition were afforded white in the last round. There is no question that luck is an element in chess, just not where we look for it.
The subject of this book, attacking chess, has always been a favorite for the chess community in general. Probably that is because we all have a romantic notion to play like Morphy or Spielmann or Tal. In that regard this book makes it clear how fortunate players of the 1990's/2000's are that the ranks of top players include so many fantastic attackers. Timman annotates 3 games by each of 11 players with the design to show how attacking play comes about. Of those players 2 are of the older generations (Karpov and Timman), one from the youngest (Volokitin), 3 from the 80's (Kasparov, Short and I. Sokolov) and the rest from the 90's (Anand, Shirov, Topalov, Ivanchuk and J. Polgar.) This large number of first class players who strive for the initiative and attack has not been witnessed on the world scene probably since the end of Hastings 1895! The diverse styles of this range of players makes one consider that attacking play in some ways is a facet of chess skill as much as a stylistic approach or matter of temperament.
Timman includes 3 of his own games, labeling his play as always in pursuit of the initiative. This doesn't seem to be a matter of ego satisfaction by Timman as much as an illustration of the value placed on the initiative by active players.
In other words, Timman isn't pretending that the skill of attacking in chess is a special trick reserved for GM's; instead he is describing the terrain that the GM is seeing and how the GM works to use that in the quest for victory. In this way the author is offering a special bit of magic to the reader: the magic of understanding what lies behind the GM's moves. The final 45 pages of the book shows fragments of 33 games in which attacking chess is the central theme. These are not restricted to the 11 players whose games appeared in the previous parts of the book. This is a good extension of the book, as it brings the reader right to the point of a game where some strategic factor has become important and how the attacking side takes advantage of that. This evolves from more of a games anthology to a workbook which can be of greater value to the aspiring player because there are more examples and less time spent on openings (which have their own library). Attacking chess is certainly more than four-move checkmates or long involved tactical sequences. This book does a good job of bringing that to light. I do have a couple of criticisms though.
Second, some of the analysis was not as good as I would have hoped. In game 3 Lautier - Karpov, for example, Timman doesn't consider the consequences of 30.Kh4. I was able to work out that 30...Nxf3+ would win the game, but why didn't the author offer some insight here? The tactics involved aren't too difficult, but this is the sort of thing that will go a long way towards a reader feeling that the book served its purpose.
This was disappointing because of the reputation Timman has for thoroughness in analysis. Still, the amount of material might be a mitigating circumstance.
Overall I was quite pleased by
the work in this book and impressed with the skill of its author to come
across to an average player like me. I can recommend this book to any
player who has the ambition to be able to determine the result of a game by
the legacy of great attackers and the willingness to work towards that goal.
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Players coming up in the 1970's
could feel especially lucky that the number of very strong players who were
also good writers was so great. Jan Timman, along with Seirawan and Nunn,
has been a leading figure of that group. Beginning with Art of Analysis,
Timman has endowed the chess community with an enormous amount of material
that is of the highest quality. On the Attack is the latest
contribution of the player once deemed "Best Player in the West" during the
days of Soviet supremacy.
Starting the book with 3 games by
Karpov is in itself most interesting. Describing the former world champion
as a player of great skill in any phase of the game, Karpov would still be
unlikely to be on the invitation list of the "Mad Hackers" dance party.
Instead, we see how Karpov would use the strategic factors in positions to
wrest the initiative and follow it home to victory.
Timman does the great service to the attentive reader in the first two sets
of games of laying out the groundwork, value of the initiative, and the
concept of attacking schemes being the end work product of strategic play,
that the analysis in the next 9 sets becomes more understandable. The
underlying ideas of winning strategic battles, applying the initiative, and
recognizing the attacking plots that follow seem to have a much sounder base
to the average player than the "mystical" attacks of a Morphy or Tal.
First, I think that the games of
11 different players is too many. Looking at 8 players with 4 games each
would have been better. My reasoning for that: a reader learns more
quickly and with greater confidence when he can identify with the subject of
his study. Personally I was hooked after the 3rd game of Tal's that I read
in a book of his games. After that I felt that I could understand so much
more because I knew the types of moves that Tal would be looking at. With
11 players, a reader might be overwhelmed by the variations in style and
lose the point of the annotations.
Another example is game 26, the famous Topalov -
Ponomariov game. The critical position is at Black's move 15 where
Ponomariov played 15...f5. Timman describes this as a panic move and offers
instead 15... Nd7 to be able to recapture on f6 with the N to guard h7 and
no other thoughts or analysis. I was astonished, as there was analysis in a
book written by a different world-class GM, actually an opening book, that
offered analysis to 15... Nd7 and still another alternative, 15...d4.
