The World's Great Chess Games

Seriously, I think this is one of those instant classics that all chess players should own! This book is not your typical chess game collection. First of all the chapters are broken down into ages, for example chapter 1 is listed as "From Philidor to Morphy" and on to others such as "The Age of Lasker" and "The Age of Fisher", etc, etc. So this book covers quite a large area of chess history with a mini biography of each master which in my opinion is worth the price of this book. The games are quite good, as you would guess and the annotations of the games are mostly short and in plain english, making it much more enjoyable to those less then masters. The only negative thing that I could say is that the games are in descriptive format making it a little harder to play out the games but if your serious about chess this certainly won't stop you as it hasn't me. Hopefully this book will get updated at some point and fix this minor weakness of an otherwise great book. The book is standard in size to most chess books and the font size is easy to read, the diagrams are a little hard on the eyes but just require that you study the diagrams a little more. So there you have it. This book should be on your bookshelf or better yet next to your chess set and relive some of the best matches in chess history.

This is an ok book. The annotation is pretty good, though in some places it is a bit sparse. The main thing I don't like about it is that it is written in the old, descriptive notation and not updated to algebraic notation. Also, The diagrams are small and the moves crammed onto pages. This is a 3.5 book rounded up to 4. I'm not sure if you should buy this book.