WHY LASKER MATTERS

Author: Andy Soltis

Batsford (paperback, 2005)

www.batsford.com

320 pages

$21.95

Reviewed by John Donaldson

Some World Champions get lots of attention and others very little. My bookshelf has over two-dozen books each on Tal and Fischer, but the selection is more modest when I look for material on Emanuel Lasker. Sure, everyone remembers the Hannak book, but that was over fifty-years ago. Gilchrist and Whyld did great work in tracking down Lasker’s games, but with no annotations. You get plenty of annotations but no words in the two volume series on the second World Champion by Chess Stars, edited by Khalifman, while works by Pytel and Zak could be interesting but you need to know Polish and Russian. Ditto for Hungarian IM Varnusz’s books on Lasker in German.

Those who want a collection of Lasker’s games with notes in English are limited. Besides the aforementioned book by Hannak, there is Fine and Lasker’s work published in 1935, but it only goes up to 1914. The second half may or may not have been written, and was certainly never published. Garry Kasparov dealt with Lasker in his MY GREAT PREDECESSORS series. Possibly up until now the best single volume source for high quality, contemporary annotations to Lasker’s games is English IM Colin Crouch’s excellent HOW TO DEFEND IN CHESS which has 100 pages devoted to the longest reigning World Champion (27 years).

Now a new book has appeared. WHY LASKER MATTERS by the indefatigable Andrew Soltis. This volume contains 100 games that are reasonably but not exhaustively annotated. There is no bibiliography, but it’s clear that Soltis has made use of other major sources including the Khalifman work. By comparison, HOW TO DEFEND IN CHESS examines only ten of Lasker’s games, but in much greater detail – about eight pages a game to about three for Soltis. One has to keep in mind that 320 pages is a big book, especially for Batsford. Longer notes would likely have meant fewer games.

Soltis goes out of his way to debunk the long held view, perhaps formulated by Reti, that Lasker deliberately played bad moves to confuse his opponent. One well-known example is the famous game with Ilyn-Genevsky from Moscow 1925 where Black sacrificed his Queen with 13...Qxa2 for a Rook, piece and pawn, which was perceived as risky at the time. Soltis points out there was absolutely nothing wrong with the move played and that trading Queens and Knights followed by ...b5 was also fully playable.

WHY LASKER MATTERS is a useful addition to the literature. It’s not likely to be the definitive book on the subject the way Soltis’ book on Marshall is, but there he had access to the Marshall Chess Club’s archives. To do a complete job on Lasker one would need closer to a thousand pages.

I would rate WHY LASKER MATTERS a buy for all those interested in this great World Champion.

Click to buy WHY LASKER MATTERS

Want more on Lasker? Click to buy or get more information about Kasparov’s first volume in the Great Predecessor series, which covers the second World Champion in detail: GARRY KASPAROV ON MY GREAT PREDECESSORS, PART 1