Book Review: Winning Chess Manoeuvres

“If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” – Issac Newton

Our BOOK OF THE WEEK is Winning Chess Manoeuvres by GM Sarhan Guliev.

It has been well established that studying the classics is an effective method of chess improvement. One of the main reasons that top players today are significantly stronger than top players of the past is that today’s top players have access to more classic games to build their understanding. GM Sarhan Guliev uses this book to effectively teach lessons from classic games, organized by motif and theme. Instead of studying scattered classic games of random themes, you will be shown an older source game with a key idea and at least one modern game that was influenced (either directly or indirectly) by that older game.

Forward: Winning Chess Manoeuvres

The reader could get the wrong impression about the aims of this book. He might think that the author is trying to show that people play chess wrongly and that they are poorly informed about the game’s classical heritage or inaccurately point out the original sources of ideas, etc.

But that is not the case. The chess elite, with a few rare exceptions, consists of players with a high cultural erudition in the game. It could not be otherwise. Even if a self-taught player, by dint of sheer natural talent, achieves success in the early phase of his career, there will come a time when he will need to ‘pore over his textbooks’ to make further progress.

Contemporary players know a lot, read a lot, and work a lot on the game. At the board, they are not fumbling in the dark. Their borrowings, in the great majority of cases. And the fact that they cannot always state exactly who the original source of the idea was, well, so what – nobody can know everything.

And there is no need.

I will ask you a question: how important was it for Anand to know the source game for this combination? How important was it to scour books and databases, to establish that Fischer was the first to use it?

The answer is obvious – it was not of the slightest importance or necessity. He demonstrated a high level of erudition and excellent sporting qualities. It is one thing to know that Fischer once played such a combination, but quite another to recall the details in the stressful conditions of a sporting contest. But the task of identifying the original source is a job for the historian, book author, and journalist.

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Why choose the Forward Chess edition? It is cheaper than the physical version and the variations are more efficient to play through on a digital board. You can also use the latest stockfish engine, add your own notes, bookmarks, and much more.

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