CHAMPIONS OF THE NEW MILLENNIUM by Lubomir Ftacnik, Danny Kopec and Walter Browne is the rare chess book that can be read for both pleasure and instruction. Game collections of the best players of an era are not as common as they use to be, but as IM Anthony Saidy points out in his fascinating foreword, CHAMPIONS OF THE NEW MILLENNIUM follows in a distinguished tradition perhaps made most famous by Richard Reti’s MASTERS of the CHESSBOARD.
The three authors have chosen 18 players for their book with the original criteria being all had to be over 2700 in rating and under age 30. Most of those featured meet this criterion but a few “old-timers” namely Anand and Ivanchuk, who will both be 40 before the year is out, just had to be included – you can’t leave a World Champion and a perennial top ten player out!
Each of the featured players has four of his or her (Judit Polgar is the one women represented) best games featured with comprehensive annotations featured both detailed analysis and plenty of prose explanation. The former is exhaustive enough that an extra chess set or a laptop running ChessBase might well be helpful but the armchair enthusiast can still get plenty from this book by just playing over the games and reading the commentary. Each of the chosen players has a one to two page biography with the authors explaining their styles and summarizing their career achievements.
Topalov, Anand, Carlsen, Kramnik, Shirov, Ponamariov (only in Russian), Kamsky and Polgar have all been the subject of books, though in some cases not major works. This reviewer knows of no game collections devoted to the other ten players featured here. Indeed Ivanchuk, one of the greatest artists in the history of chess, is long overdue. Until he writes a book of his best games, CHAMPIONS OF THE NEW MILLENNIUM’S four excellently presented games will have to serve as a tasty appetizer for “Chucky”.
Here is the complete list of the players featured with theirJanuary 2009 ratings and World ranking.
1 Veselin Topalov (2796 - World no. 1)
2 Viswanathan Anand (2791 - World no. 2)
3 Vassily Ivanchuk (2779 - World no. 3)
4 Magnus Carlsen (2776 - World no. 4)
5 Alexander Morozevich (2771 - World no. 5)
6 Teimour Radjabov (2760 - World no. 6)
7 Vladimir Kramnik (2759 - World no. 8)
8 Peter Leko (2751 - World no. 9)
9 Levon Aronian (2750 - World no. 11)
10 Alexei Shirov (2745 - World no. 12)
11 Wang Yue (2739 - World no. 13)
12 Alexander Grischuk (2733 - World no. 14)
13 Ruslan Ponomariov (2726 - World no. 16)
14 Gata Kamsky (2725 - World no. 17)
15 Shakhriyar Mamedyarov (2724 - World no. 18)
16 Peter Svidler (2723 - World no. 20)
17 Sergey Karjakin (2706 - World no. 27)
18 Judit Polgar (2693 - World no. 36)
Danny Kopec mentions the difficulties the authors faced in making their selection of players, particularly whether to include Yue or another strong Chinese player Bu. Had they waited a little longer in making their selections, Jakovenko, Alexeev, Nakamura and Vachier-Lagrave would all have been strong candidates and fans of more mature years will note the omission of Boris Gelfand who, though over 40, still remains among the world’s best – but a line had to be drawn somewhere.
CHAMPIONS OF THE NEW MILLENNIUM is a beautiful book. It is printed on very high quality paper with a very clean and clear two-column layout. There are plenty of diagrams in each game to allow the more ambitious to try to follow the commentary without a board should they choose. Those who purchased the Quality Chess book on San Luis 2005 will remember it featured many fine color photographs. Here the publishers and authors have done even better. I counted just over 100 beautiful color photos in Champions of the New Millennium which must be some kind of record. Some, like the full page portraits of Grischuk (page 308), Mamedyarov (page 356) and Polgar (page 426) are quite striking.
This book is very attractively priced at $29.95 and would make an excellent Christmas present.
