Game Collection Books

*** THE NEW WORLD CHESS CHAMPION ***

On 12 December 2024 Gukesh D became the 18th World Chess Champion, defeating Ding Liren by a score of 7.5–6.5. This made him the youngest undisputed world chess champion in history and the second Indian to hold the title after Vishy Anand. 

This book, published just a few months before his amazing world title victory, covers his 70 most exciting games up to and including the 2024 Candidates Tournament.

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Gukesh Dommaraju became the challenger for the 2024 World Chess Championship when the then 17 year old won the Candidates Tournament in Toronto earlier that year, ahead of favourites including Hikaru Nakamura, Fabiano Caruana and Ian Nepomniachtchi. A year earlier Gukesh wasn't so well known in the West, even though the chess prodigy had been consistently breaking records:

* Gukesh was the second-youngest Grandmaster in chess history, missing being the youngest-ever by only 17 days.

* He was the fourth-youngest player to shatter the stratospheric 2700 rating barrier.

* He was the youngest-ever winner of the Candidates cycle at age 17, making him the youngest challenger in a World Chess Championship match.

Gukesh's style and strategic mastery much resemble those of the young Anatoly Karpov. He wins imperceptibly, where every 12 moves or so you notice his position improving, seemingly without having done anything! Gukesh seeks to smother his opponent's intentions in the crib, before they have a chance to grow into actual threats.

In 70 fully annotated games, this book covers Gukesh's fiercest battles against many of the world's top players. Opponents include world champions Magnus Carlsen, Ding Liren, Vishy Anand and Vladimir Kramnik, as well as other world-class players such as Caruana, Nepo, Nakamura, Giri, Firouzja, Vidit, and his long-standing rival Praggnanandhaa among others. Seven games are taken from the Toronto Candidates Tournament.

The third volume of Elk and Ruby’s treatise on Viktor Korchnoi, penned by FM Hans Renette and IM Tibor Karolyi, covers the period 1981-1991. This encompasses Korchnoi’s famous world championship match with Karpov at Merano in 1981, his candidates matches against Portisch and Kasparov in 1983, Hjartarson in 1988 and Sax and Timman in 1991, as well as the candidates tournament of 1985 at Montpellier, the GMA world cup series and major tournament performances. Much biographical colour is supplied on his life and character, with this period including his family’s arrival from the Soviet Union to the West in 1982 and its subsequent breakup. Like in volumes I and II, original material is provided from interviews with key protagonists and sources from a wide range of languages are used.

140 games and fragments are analysed in detail in this work. Other opponents include Tal, Spassky, Ivanchuk, Topalov, Gulko, Larsen, Sosonko, Seirawan, Ribli, Torre, Yusupov, Van der Wiel, Van der Sterren, Andersson, Polugaevsky, Nunn, Miles, Short, Speelman, and Beliavsky, among others.

The book is supplemented with a generous supply of photos, some taken from the Korchnoi family archive and never before published.

Vassily Ivanchuk has been one of the World's leading chess players for over two decades. He announced his arrival as a 21-year-old when he defeated Garry Kasparov on the way to winning the Linares Super-Grandmaster event. In a distinguished career he has won countless elite tournaments and was a FIDE World Championship finalist.

Ivanchuk is considered by many contemporaries to be a chess genius, and he has acquired a huge fan base that delights in his enterprising and creative play. His original style has helped to create games full of brilliant attacking chess and masterful strategy. In this book, Junior Tay invites you to join him in a study of his favourite Ivanchuk games, and shows us how we can all improve by learning from Ivanchuk's masterpieces.

Move by Move provides an ideal platform to study chess. By continually challenging the reader to answer probing questions throughout the book, the Move by Move format greatly encourages the learning and practising of vital skills just as much as the traditional assimilation of knowledge. Carefully selected questions and answers are designed to keep you actively involved and allow you to monitor your progress as you learn. This is an excellent way to improve your chess skills and knowledge.

In Chess Survivor – The Last of the Greats a chess legend shares his life story and annotates his best games.

When FIDE introduced the grandmaster title in 1950, Andor Lilienthal was one of the 27 names on that original list. And when he died at age 99, he was the last survivor of that historic group. This inspired our title. Douglas Griffin translated Lilienthal’s book from Russian and added 17 games to the 60 that Lilienthal annotated.

Lilienthal met or played all the World Champions of the 20th century. In fact, that understates it – Lilienthal won a game against Lasker, whose reign began in the 19th century. And some 21st-century champions, such as Vladimir Kramnik, certainly met Lilienthal. One might say that Lilienthal was connected to three centuries of chess.

Lilienthal’s quality of play matched his longevity. Most famous is his win against Capablanca in 1935. Equally famous is the story that when Bobby Fischer saw Lilienthal in the audience during his 1992 return match against Spassky, Fischer immediately said: “Pawn e5 takes f6!” – a reference to that Capablanca game.

Dragoljub Velimirovic was a former Yugoslav - Serbian, chess grandmaster whose international career was handicapped by political intrigues and his outspoken temperament. During the heyday of the USSR as the greatest national chess power, the former Yugoslavia was capable of running the Soviet Union a good second. Dragoljub Velimirovic posed a real threat to the men from Moscow.

Velimirovic was born in 1942 to a prominent family from Valjevo, in the former Yugoslavia. He was introduced to chess at the age of seven by his mother, Jovanka Velimirovic, one of Yugoslavia's leading female chess players. He died at the age 72, being one of the last players to develop a system or strategy that is so inventive it bears its creator's name. It is a feat that is unlikely to be repeated in the modern era, when computer-based games and databases so thoroughly dominate competition that it is almost impossible to come up with something new. That does not mean that players were more talented or courageous in the decades when Velimirovic was in his prime. Velimirovic, who became a grandmaster in 1973, was never among the 20 top-ranked players in the world. And that was when there were only 200 or so grandmasters; today, there are about 2,400.

Marshall’s Brilliant Victory

In the spring of 1904, most of the chess world’s elite gathered in the sleepy northwestern Pennsylvania town of Cambridge Springs, where the first great tournament of the twentieth century was to take place. World Champion Emanuel Lasker topped the field. The champions of America (Harry Pillsbury), Russia (Mikhail Chigorin), France (David Janowski) and the Austria-Hungarian Empire (Carl Schlechter) were also playing.

Among the other players in this historic fifteen-round-robin event was a young master from Brooklyn, Frank Marshall. He had some international experience, including defeating World Champion Lasker in their individual encounter at Paris in 1900. However, he certainly was not considered among the favorites at the time. Nevertheless, Marshall finished in first place, two full points ahead of the rest of the field, the only undefeated player.

The story of this great tournament is superbly told by author Robert Sherwood. Each game is deeply annotated, while contemporary sources and rare archival photos nicely supplement the round-by-round account.

With this victory, Frank Marshall took his place among the world-class players of his era. You are invited to join Marshall on his journey in this splendid account of his magnificent triumph in the first major international tournament of the twentieth century.

Victor Bologan is not only a strong and creative chess grandmaster, he has also made a career in Moldovan and world chess politics. His strong will and incredible versatility have enabled him to lead a colourful and interesting life. ‘Believe in yourself’ is his motto and it has taken him to places many of us will never see.

A sparkling description of the many roads Bologan has travelled lies before you. In this autobiography you will read about the adventures of an enterprising youngster in turbulent Moldova, his collaborations with renowned chess coaches such as Vyacheslav Chebanenko, Zigurds Lanka and Mark Dvoretsky, and his alliances with top players such as Alexander Morozevich, Ruslan Ponomariov, Vladimir Kramnik and Garry Kasparov. The book also offers a candid insight into Bologan's activities as Executive Director of the World Chess Federation FIDE and his career in Moldovan national politics.

Central to this book, of course, is Bologan's chess career. His most impressive tournament victory was in Dortmund in 2003, where he beat both Vishy Anand and Vladimir Kramnik. But he also won the incredibly strong Aeroflot Open in Moscow in 1995 and twice came first in a personal favourite, the annual Poikovsky tournament. Bologan has extensively annotated 88 of his best and most attractive games.

Victor Bologan (1971) is a world-class grandmaster who has won many prestigious tournaments. In 2005 he was ranked 18th in the world. For New In Chess Bologan has written the acclaimed and ground-breaking opening manuals The Chebanenko Slav, The Rossolimo for Club Players, The Powerful Catalan, Bologan's King's Indian, Bologan's Caro-Kann, Bologan's Ruy Lopez for Black and Bologan's Black Weapons in the Open Games.

Ian Nepomniachtchi, challenger to Magnus Carlsen’s World Championship title in 2021, is an outstanding chess talent. “Nepo” as he is universally known is a fascinating player and this book assesses his career and analyses his original and creative style in great depth with numerous deeply annotated games.

Nepo is one of the very few players in the world to hold (at least prior to the match) a plus score (four wins to one with six draws) against Carlsen in classical chess. Nepo and Carlsen are peers and first started playing each other in the Under-12 category of the World Youth Championship in 2002. In that event, Nepo edged out Carlsen on tie-break. At that time he out-rated Carlsen by 100 points and was generally considered to be the more promising of the two prodigies.

Nepo is a fascinating player who loves open and irrational positions and excels when on the attack. Unsurprisingly, he cites Mikhail Tal as his all-time favorite player and says Tal is the player who has exerted the greatest influence on him. As with that great Latvian genius, Nepo thrives on anarchy and chaos and has frequently got the better of Carlsen in games with mind-boggling complications. He is also lethal when he has the initiative.

Nepo has steadily climbed the world rankings and his finest achievement was his victory in the 2020/2021 Candidates’ tournament with 8½/14 points (+5-2=7) which gave him the right to challenge Carlsen for the world title. 

Cyrus Lakdawala is an International Master, a former National Open and American Open Champion, and a six-time State Champion. He has been teaching chess for over 40 years, and coaches some of the top junior players in the U.S.

The second volume of Elk and Ruby’s treatise on Viktor Korchnoi, penned by FM Hans Renette and IM Tibor Karolyi, covers the period 1969-1980. This encompasses Korchnoi’s famous world championship fight with Karpov at Baguio City in 1978, his candidates final matches against Karpov in 1974 and Hubner in 1980, as well as the related candidates cycles and major tournament performances. Much biographical colour is supplied on his life and character, with this period including his defection from the Soviet Union to the West in 1976. Like in Volume I, original material is provided from interviews with key protagonists and their relatives, while sources in Russian, German, Dutch and Hungarian as well as English are used to paint the most comprehensive portrait of Korchnoi available. 

140 games and fragments are analysed in detail in this work. As well as Karpov and Hubner, opponents include Fischer, Spassky, Petrosian, Smyslov, Portisch, Geller, Najdorf, Timman, Larsen, Mecking, Sosonko, Andersson, Ljubojevic, Polugaevsky, Nunn, and Miles among others. Many new discoveries are made in the analysis. In particular, the authors identify that Korchnoi worked hard to improve his endgame ability significantly during the time that he was boycotted in tournaments by the Soviets, which is most surprising given that he was in his mid-forties by then, and was the best player of his time at endgame tactics. Further, the authors found that his reputation as a pawn grabber was highly exaggerated, and that he carried out a huge number of king attacks on the h-file. They also discovered that Korchnoi more than matched Karpov for openings in the 1978 title bout despite the unprecedented preparation of the Soviet chess machine, and that the key reason he lost that match was time trouble. 

The book is supplemented with a generous supply of photos, many taken from the Korchnoi family archive and never before published.

Boris Spassky is the most underappreciated World Champion in chess history, remembered as the Soviet who lost to Bobby Fischer in 1972. In this two-volume work, biographer extraordinaire Tibor Karolyi puts the focus on Spassky’s brilliant career and life story.

Born in 1937, Spassky barely escaped with his life when evacuating from the Siege of Leningrad as a young boy. This book tells the story of how that boy subsequently learned to play chess and rose through the Soviet ranks to become the strongest player in the world in the late 1960s.

International Master Tibor Karolyi is a renowned author and trainer from Hungary. His biographical works for Quality Chess have received glowing praise from readers and reviewers.

In his heyday, Samuel Reshevsky was one of the great contenders for the world title and, according to Bobby Fischer, for a period of about ten years, from 1946 to 1956, he was the best player in the world.

This book contains sixty of his best games, all analysed and annotated.

It also includes exercises and answers to various questions that might arise in the mind of the reader.

I believe this is a good method, both for teaching and learning.

The author hopes that in this way the reader will learn from the magnificent play of Sammy Reshevsky, and grow to admire it as much as I do.

Dragoljub Velimirovic was a former Yugoslav - Serbian, chess grandmaster whose international career was handicapped by political intrigues and his outspoken temperament. During the heyday of the USSR as the greatest national chess power, the former Yugoslavia was capable of running the Soviet Union a good second. Dragoljub Velimirovic posed a real threat to the men from Moscow.

Velimirovic was born in 1942 to a prominent family from Valjevo, in the former Yugoslavia. He was introduced to chess at the age of seven by his mother, Jovanka Velimirovic, one of Yugoslavia's leading female chess players. He died at the age 72, being one of the last players to develop a system or strategy that is so inventive it bears its creator's name. It is a feat that is unlikely to be repeated in the modern era, when computer-based games and databases so thoroughly dominate competition that it is almost impossible to come up with something new. That does not mean that players were more talented or courageous in the decades when Velimirovic was in his prime. Velimirovic, who became a grandmaster in 1973, was never among the 20 top-ranked players in the world. And that was when there were only 200 or so grandmasters; today, there are about 2,400.