Seirawan: Winning Chess Brilliancies

I’ve always enjoyed playing over chess games by grand masters, some of which helped me a lot to understand some strategic motifs. Well, given my current level of play this doesn’t mean much, but going over games from books such as Irving Chernev’s Capablanca’s Best Chess Endings surely helped me beat my friends with ease. Well, I still get whipped at FICS pretty good. To ease my mind into studying chess again, I picked up another collection of games, and it certainly was the most elaborate one I have ever encountered: Yasser Seirawan’s Winning Chess Brilliancies.

Seirawan goes over pretty much every single move of the 12 games he has selected. Unfortunately, this meant that as a relative beginner you got some great basic information in the first few games, but at the latest at the 50% mark there is a certain amount of repetition and possibly even tediousness involved. Nonetheless, I got some great insights due to Spassky:


Sometimes there is nothing to do on the board!

This was quite a revelation for me because I thought I always had to “improve the position”, but if you are defending, then it’s okay to move the queen from one square to the left to one square to the right and wait for your opponent to launch his attack. After all, weather the storm and you might well be victorious. It didn’t help Spassky defend his title against Fischer (1972 World Championship, Game 6).

 In later games, though, Seirawan lost me at points. There were quite a few instances of him going into complicated variations, which doesn’t quite seem to fit the book otherwise. I’ve enjoyed Winning Chess Brilliancies, but it’s hardly a book that makes you work really hard. You learn a bit about chess strategy, get to read pieces of not-so-recent chess history --- the book was published in 1995, yet goes as far back as 1972 ---, and all of a sudden three pages of variations hit you on the head. Well, not me because I skipped them. If you want to make me work, give me something to do throughout, and don’t pull out that stuff out of thin air! I prefer getting my fix of tactics and analysis in more concentrated form.

Anyway, it was an enjoying read nonetheless. Yet, I don't quite know who the target audience of the book might be. Probably it's a good book to give as a gift to someone with a side interest in chess.