This is another impressive work by Neil McDonald, brimming with all of his love and enthusiasm for the game. In a way, the Chess Secrets series from Everyman Chess is midway between a textbook, albeit a somewhat free-ranging one, and a player’s (or rather players’) games collection. Here, we have a slue of ‘power play’ stars on the same bill: 88 games from the likes of Morphy, Alekhine, Bronstein, Geller and, the baby of the bunch and the current world number two, Topalov. A festival line-up to vie with the best, you’ll surely agree.
McDonald adds value to this line-up by noting affinities between these five great players, drawing out common themes that arise in their games (e.g. the use of the queen in attack) and noting points of influence (for example, ‘In the footsteps of Morphy‘ is the title given to Bronstein’s famous game versus Rojahn at the Moscow Olympiad, 1956).
The chief characteristic of the ‘power play’ style is dynamism, coupled with a wily use of psychology and a willingness to take risks. It leads to games where tactics and creativity often predominate; as McDonald puts it, this style ‘is full of profound, unexpected ideas and stresses the human side of the game’. That there’s a fuzzy demarcation point between a ‘power play’ style and an attacking style of play should be self-evident; and the three players who feature in the Great Attackers title in this series (written by Colin Crouch) could probably appear here too.
Along with many classic games, and quite a number of lesser-known gems, there’s the surprising, ‘you have no right to expect this’ content that McDonald always seems to deliver.
With this in mind, let me draw your attention, in particular, to the essay on the Morphy-Harrwitz match of 1858, in the chapter dealing with the psychological aspects of preparation; it takes up all of pages 191-199. Morphy lost the opening two games of that match, but he had the nous to tailor his play in later games so as to accentuate his own strengths, whilst also exposing his opponent’s shortcomings. Or, at any rate, making Harrwitz feel very uncomfortable indeed. McDonald annotates the first four games of the match and he shows how Morphy turned around 0-2 to 2-2, and eventually got to 5-2 with one draw, which is how the match ended when Harrwitz threw in the towel. Perhaps Fischer, in part, had this debacle against Harrwitz in mind when he wrote that ‘in a set match, Morphy would beat anybody alive today’.
In the same chapter, McDonald gives a fascinating account of how Alekhine beat Capablanca in the 1927 World Championship match, at a time when the latter was considered to be invincible. Incidentally, Fischer was less enamored of the fourth World Chess Champion, the only other player here who made his top ten. Fischer’s appraisal of Alekhine is amusing, overall, and I’ve always relished the remark that ‘it is hard to find mistakes in his game, but in a sense his whole method of play was a mistake.’ Fischer displays a visceral repulsion here, almost, to Alekhine’s approach to chess.
CHESS SECRETS: THE GIANTS OF POWER PLAY ably merits an enthusiastic thumbs-up. You only have to look at the quintet of players on show to know that you are going to be royally entertained, and Neil McDonald’s writing is engaging and accessible yet has real substance too. One neat, snazzy characteristic he has, as Master of Ceremonies: all the points he makes in the text are validated and complemented by the selected games.
