CHICAGO 1926 and LAKE HOPATCONG 1926 (two tournaments in one volume)
Notes by Bob Sherwood
Caissa Editions (2009)
197 pages (hardcover)
$40.00 (Postage $4.00 in the United States)

Reviewed by Jeremy Silman

At one time the only way a player could find games from an event was by tournament books or by tournament bulletins. Today that's changed, and ChessBase allows you to call up games from tournaments, matches, and even simultaneous exhibitions with the click of a button. However, this “progress” carries a price: the games in ChessBase don’t have much emotional punch. On the other hand, good or great tournament books offer notes to the games, photos that bring the players to life, round by round color, and sometimes other goodies as well that make you feel as if you’ve gone back in time and are actually living out the event.

I should point out one important oddity in the battle between a database and tournament book: the tournament book features every known game from an event (sadly, many are permanently lost), while a good database is often missing huge amounts of games from lesser-known tournaments and/or lesser-known players. Thus my database of over 3,850,000 games only has 27 from the Chicago 1926 event, while the tournament book we’re about to discuss has 78!

This new Caissa Editions book (A Limited edition – only 1,000 were printed and each volume is numbered) brings us two interesting events from 1926. While Lake Hopatcong 1926 is fairly well known due to the participation of Capablanca, Chicago 1926 has been more or less forgotten. Fortunately, CHICAGO 1926 and LAKE HOPATCONG 1926 has rectified this problem, bringing this interesting event back to life with several nice photos (and some caricatures too), a very interesting introduction, a list of all 13 competitors (Frank Marshall, Carlos Torre, Geza Maroczy, Charles Jaffe, Abraham Kupchik, Isaac Kashdan, Samuel Factor, Edward Lasker, Adolf Fink, Newell Banks, Oscar Chajes, Jackson Showalter, Lewis Isaacs) with their birth and death dates and where they were born and died, the tournament crosstable, a round-by-round scores crosstable, pairings for each round with opening name, and the games from that round which are all nicely annotated by Bob Sherwood. At the end of the event you also get an index of games and an index of openings.

Lake Hopatcong 1926 (with Capablanca, Kupchik, Maroczy, Marshall, and Edward Lasker) was held right after the Chicago event, and so it seems just that it appears in the book after Chicago 1926 ends. This tournament gets the same treatment and is a welcome addition to a very nice book.

CHICAGO 1926 and LAKE HOPATCONG 1926 is a fine looking book, hardbound, easy on the eyes (clear, good sized print), and fun to read. If you collect tournament books, or are a fan of chess giants like Capablanca, Marshall, Maroczy, etc., then you should grab a copy before all 1,000 are taken.

To buy, send payment to this address:

Dale A. Brandreth
Caissa Editions
P.O. Box 151
Yorklyn, DE 19736

You can also visit this site for more material by Mr. Brandreth: http://www.chessbookstore.com/

You can contact Mr. Brandreth at dbrandreth3@comcast.net