To
me, the crème de la crème of chess
publications continues to be CHESS INFORMANT.
It fulfills a different function than the YEARBOOKS,
which I reviewed elsewhere (click HERE
for that review). Those (YEARBOOKS) give specialized
treatment and full coverage of various opening
variations, whereas INFORMANT gives sample games
in just about every main opening with some sparkling
middlegame play and/or complex endings reflective
of high-level play.
I read the INFORMANT avidly, in
part because I have the background knowledge of
the openings that I am interested in as well as
specialized books on them. Thus the INFORMANT
provides the most important extra ingredient:
thoroughly annotated recent games using those
openings by the world's very top players (including
Kasparov, Kramnik, Anand, Leko, Ponomariev, Shirov,
Gelfand, Judith Polgar, the rising young stars,
etc.).
Importantly, the contributors are
choosing some of their most interesting games,
so the middlegames can be extremely interesting
and/or instructive. There is also a wealth of
side material. Issues 84 (341 pages) and 85 (356
pages) are typical in that regard. They have these
sections: (a) the 10 best games from the previous
issue, with a survey of the opening from the top
game; (b) the games section itself (488 games
in INFORMANT 84); (c) Index of Player and Index
of Annotators; (d) a list of combination exercises
from that volume; (e) a list of endgame exercises;
(f) a list of tournaments, players, and results
from the time period between Informants (73 of
them in INFORMANT 84!); and (g) a section of games,
novelties, combinations, endings and statistics
on one of the leading players of the day (Short
in 84, Portisch in 85).
All developing players might do
the following: try out one issue of INFORMANT
(you can usually get a used one from most chess
booksellers, while used bookstores also occasionally
have them) and see what you think. If the lack
of prose (there is none at all) isn't too off-putting,
you might want to get this periodical for some
time to come. It is published three times a year.
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