RUSSIANS VERSUS FISCHER
Authors: Dmitry Plisetsky and Sergey Voronkov
Everyman Chess
www.everymanchess.com
462 pages
$35.00
Reviewed by John Donaldson
The first edition of RUSSIANS VERSUS FISCHER by Dmitry Plisetsky and Sergey Voronkov created quite a stir when it appeared in 1994. Eleven years later the authors are back with a bigger edition. I can unreservedly recommend this book to anyone with an interest in Bobby Fischer who doesn’t have a copy of the first edition. The 158 annotated games are nice but the real selling point are the many artifacts from the Soviet Chess archives relating to different points in Bobby’s career. When this book first came out they produced quite a sensation.
The real question is, if you have the first edition should you buy pay $35 for the second? How to compare the two editions? The second has more pages – 462 to 396, but this is not quite a true indication of how much new material has been added because the second edition has a much more generous and handsome layout. The real differences seem to be the following:
1. 158 games (most annotated) in the new edition versus 148 in the old. The new games come from the 1970 super blitz tournament in Herceg Novi.
2. More special documents. I found one with excerpts from Polugaevsky and Kortcnoi from 1964 that was not in the first edition. There are probably more.
3. More, larger and much clearer photographs in the 2nd edition.
4. As mentioned earlier, a much cleaner and easier to read layout with a larger typeface than the original.
5. Complete crosstables instead of such standings for major tournaments.
5. The original translation wasn’t bad but the new one by Ken Neat is better.
In summary if you have the first edition and are exclusively a content chess book buyer, you will probably be satisfied with it. However, if you want to have everything related to Bobby and like beautifully produced hardback books, this is one you will not want to miss. It would also make a very nice Christmas gift.
Though we don’t have the new edition of this book, we do carry the 1994 edition of RUSSIANS VERSUS FISCHER.
