MY GREAT PREDECESSORS has only been out a few weeks and already is creating quite a stir. It is safe to say that few chess books have given rise to such disparate opinions, in part because expectations were raised when Kasparov called it “the most significant thing I have done besides winning the World Championship in 1985.”

Leading the chorus of supporters is GM Mathew Sadler who writes in New in Chess: “If you haven’t got the message already – this is a fantastic book. The sort of book that I will have to lock away for fear of spending too much time reading and re-reading it!”

Considerably less enthusiastic are the reviews by Edward Winter (www.chesscafe.com/winter/winter.htm) and Swiss IM Richard Forster (www.chesshistory.com/) that point out some of the errors to be found in this book. Winter points out the many factual mistakes and Forster deficiencies in game analysis, dissecting Capablanca-Bogoljubow, Moscow 1925. It is hard to argue with their conclusions.

What went wrong? Is the book just a potboiler? At first the pairing of Plisetsky and Kasparov would seem to be an excellent team. The former has earned good marks for his book on Janowsky and work on THE RUSSIANS VERSUS FISCHER. Kasparov’s TEST OF TIME justly deserves to be called a classic and his books on his 1980s World Championship matches were well received. With MY GREAT PREDECESSORS PART I, which covers not only Steinitz, Lasker, Capablanca and Alekhine but also other important players like Rubinstein, the two authors have taken on a considerably larger project and the size of this handsomely produced book is substantial.

Few other World Champions have so much on their plate besides playing chess as Kasparov. This makes one wonder about the full extent of his involvement in writing MY GREAT PREDECESSORS, particularly as Forster points out that much of the annotations have been taken from other sources, often without attribution. In his defense, Kasparov would likely have discovered many of these variations himself. Also, with the increasing use of Fritz as either a primary or secondary resource for analysis, it is sometimes a bit tricky defining exactly whose work to credit. Still, things could have been much improved and one is left with the distinct impression that Kasparov dabbled rather than totally devoted himself to selecting and annotating games.

On balance, MY GREAT PREDECESSORS PART I represents good value if one lowers one’s expectations and views it as a very reasonably priced hardback game collection ($35 list but $25 on several websites) rather than the definitive historical guide to the early World Champions. It is too bad that Kasparov and Plisetsky didn’t hire Winter to fact check the book. It could have been much better and one hopes more care is taken with upcoming volumes.

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