TEST YOUR CHESS WITH DANIEL KING

Author: Daniel King

240 pages

$21.95

Batsford (2004)

Reviewed by John Donaldson

Grandmaster Jonathan Rowson, in the latest issue of NEW IN CHESS MAGAZINE (issue 8, 2004), while acknowledging that game collections can provide a lot of pleasure, questions whether they really help a player’s game. The key issue to Rowson is engagement. Through his experience and the observation of others, Rowson has noticed that few make it from cover to cover with anything close to complete concentration. The Scottish GM’s solution to the problem is to play over game collections for pleasure and to go over tough exercises (for example, those found in Dvoretsky’s books) to really stretch himself. One could argue that different game collections have varying pedagogical value and self-motivated individuals could learn a tremendous amount going through Botvinnik’s three volume series of his games, but in general Rowson is right. Having said this maybe there is a third way combining training and pleasure.

TEST YOUR CHESS WITH DANIEL KING by the well-known English Grandmaster might just be the best of both worlds. King has taken twenty top games, analyzed them extensively and sprinkled in plenty of instructive comments. All the games have a predict-a-move structure, where you try to guess the next move and are rewarded points by how successful you are. When you have gone through all the games, a chart allows you to compare your results with others who taken the challenge.

The games that King has selected are primarily from relatively recent top-level encounters. Indeed pretty much all of the current world elite (Kasparov, Kramnik, Anand, Topalov, Adams, etc.) are represented. Don’t miss the out of this world game Ganbold-Banikas (number 20) from the Istanbul Olympiad. Previous to reading this book, I knew Odondoo Ganbold, a Mongolian IM now living in Oakland, from his participation in the Mechanics’ Institute Chess Club’s (San Francisco) Tuesday Night Marathon, but this game made me appreciate his creative style even more.

One of the pleasures of reading this book, apart from the well chosen and commented games, are King’s personal observations about the players. A journalist and TV commentator, as well as a good Grandmaster, King knows many of the world’s elite and his insights make for interesting reading.

Readers of the English magazine Chess and Germany’s Schach 64 are no doubt familiar with King’s column which featured some of these games. Of the twenty that appear in TEST YOUR CHESS WITH DANIEL KING, thirteen were specifically written for this book and the others were update and reworked.

I can recommend this book without reservation to a wide group of readers ranging in strength from 1600 on up.

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Copyright 2005 John Donaldson