Author: Dan Heisman
Published by Mongoose Press (2011)

192 pages

$16.95

The premise of the book is that annotating your own games can help you to play better chess. By examining the choices you made during the game – and how they turned out – you can pinpoint the flaws in your thinking process so that you can work on them. This is an accepted premise among most chess teachers and trainers, and it was advice I also received as a young aspiring player from an early chess mentor, USCF expert and national TD Paul D. Shannon.  In fact, I spent a lot of time in my formative years engaged in the same activity discussed in this book.

This is, as the title suggests, a revised and expanded version of a book that was first published in 2001. During the 10-year hiatus, the author fixed a few typos and added some bracketed new comments but left alone any earlier analysis mistakes in the main body of the text. This is understandable, as the premise of the book is to view how the annotator annotated the games at the time, not to necessarily distill ‘the truth’ about any particular position or game.

The primary new comments, however, are those of the 2009 World Computer Chess Champion Rybka, to “help the reader understand the ‘truth’ of the position, especially in the more analytical lines.” The author also uses Rybka to completely re-analyze and annotate two of the more complicated games in the book, done as completely separate annotations. This is an interesting approach, which allows the reader to compare and contrast those earlier annotations with those of a tactical genius like Rybka.  The book also contains two new games reflecting Dan’s more recent over-the-board efforts.

As noted above, I completely agree with the premise that annotating one’s own games can help a player improve, so in that respect the book is on a firm foundation. The actual task of how to go about annotating a game is covered in about 5 pages in the book’s introduction. Much of the discussion is useful advice – particularly discussion of how (and not) to use computers as part of annotations and analysis. I totally agree here that players must do their own in-depth analysis and annotation before consulting their computer program of choice for assistance. This, however, isn’t particularly groundbreaking advice.

In fact, my primary concern with the book is that while the underlying premise is good and the games give a glimpse of how one player and author went about putting the advice into practice, I am not so sure that the book will do the same for other players.  The book is less concerned with the specifics of annotation than with the annotations themselves.  While that is understandable, I would have expected more editorial comment, perhaps between games, as to how the annotations reflected the particular skill level of the annotator and how that may have changed from prior (or future) examples.  Some of this sort of critique might assist a player in understanding how their how approach might be improved.

In general, this is an interesting set of games (although, let’s face it, if you’re buying the book for the games you’re going to have to accept the weaknesses present in many of the games when involving players rated well below 2000), and Dan Heisman is a good writer. You’ll no doubt find yourself drawn into some of the games, particularly where they represent the author attaining goals, such as games that led to an expert and national master rating for the first time.

The newer material is interesting, particularly the contrast in annotations of the two games described above. Heisman, in the discussion of computer-assisted analysis, explores the pluses and minuses of this assistance and provides some useful insight on best way to use them for analysis. 

While this is an advantage of the revised and expanded second edition, I found the use of bracketed comments representing Rybka’s move preferences in most of the other games where this is included to be more distracting than helpful. In many instances, these are provided as simply a reference that Rybka preferred ‘x’ rather than the move actually played. There is no explanation as to why that was preferred, and it adds little to the discussion of the game. In my opinion, the author needed to do a better job of incorporating these suggestions, either with additional analysis or discussion.  From my perspective, as presented, this ‘annotation’ comes across as haphazard.

With these concerns duly noted, there are things I enjoyed about the book. Heisman does tell a good story, and his annotations help frame several interesting games. His later analytical efforts are good and in many cases more accessible than those you might find from stronger internationally titled players that often have a hard time annotating for a broader chess audience.

In the end, I view this book as similar to the phrase ‘a man without a country.’ This is meant as an example of use of annotations to improve one’s chess but isn’t really written that way. While it’s a collection of annotated games, many, while interesting, are not of sufficient quality to be supremely useful for teaching purposes. Finally it tells several good stories but isn’t really a ‘best games’ collection – as the author states, it is more a ‘best games up to this point in my career’ collection of games. For the reader who understands these caveats, it may be a good read and may, if nothing else, spur them to start annotating their own games.

For those who are interested, the publisher has provided a 15 page glimpse of the book, which includes the introduction (which, quite frankly, is the bulk of the discussion about ‘how to’ annotate a game, plus one of the author’s early efforts.

Click to buy (or get more information about)

THE IMPROVING ANNOTATOR: FROM BEGINNER TO MASTER