The Greatest Tournaments 2001-2009: A Review
Sunday, May 30, 2010 at 11:52PM The Greatest Tournaments 2001-2009, Chess Informant 2010. 519 pp. $39.95. Reviewed by Dennis Monokroussos.
While the Informant was at one time the leading - almost exclusive - source of high-quality chess information, it is now just one competitor of many in a crowded field. So the Informant people are trying to release products that highlight its strengths, one of which I’ll review here.
The usual format of the Informant is this: a collection of games that are either played by leading players, high-quality or theoretically important (or some combination thereof), followed by sections featuring combinations and endgames and then a list of tournament results. The Greatest Tournaments 2001-2009 (TGT) recapitulates that format, but with an obvious twist: the only games that are included are those from the 86 events that met the following criteria:
They were played with a classical time control (no rapid events).
They were round-robins with at least six players (no swisses, knockouts, or matches).
They were category 17 (average rating 2651) and up.
The tournaments are presented in chronological order, and per usual the best/most interesting games, opening fragments, combinations and endgames of each are presented. All are annotated in the Informant’s characteristically languageless style, generally by one of the players. Lots of statistical information is provided too, from tournament crosstables (given with the games and fragments) to a summary table of the tournaments with their categories and winners, a list of tournament winner statistics (Topalov won 12 during that period, the most, and the events he won are listed) and then the percentage statistics of every single player in those events is given too, with both their overall percentage and their stats for each tournament taken singly.
The content is excellent, of course, as one would expect: all the world’s best players are represented, with games and annotations from Kasparov, Kramnik, Anand, Topalov, Carlsen, Aronian, Shirov and all the other players who are or have been household names among chess fans. From this standpoint, the book’s value is unimpeachable. Still, I do have some criticisms.
First, ironically, for all the detailed background information they provide about the players’ performances, categorized information about the book’s own contents are almost non-existent! We aren’t told how many “games” (I’ll use that to refer to all the chess content: complete games, opening fragments, combination fragments and endgame fragments) are included or their breakdown. There’s no index of players or openings, or of types of combinations or endings. There’s no list of annotators either. In short, there’s no quick way to search for anything whatsoever.
The opening fragments are also of questionable value. A move might have been a significant novelty at the time of its inception, but that doesn’t mean it’s any good now. While the old annotations might generally be excellent, opening theory develops so rapidly that one cannot know on spec if the original theoretical evaluations are right or not. So I’m rather ambivalent about those fragments, but to be fair there aren’t so many of them.
I like that there are the combinations and endgames, but here, oddly, there’s no indication of whose move it is. In a normal Informant, the solutions are given later, and below the diagram there’s a ? (for White to move) or …? (for Black to move) followed by the intended aim (e.g. +- for a White win, -+ for a Black win, = for a draw). Here, there’s nothing but the moves and analysis immediately following, which makes it a real challenge for anyone who’d like to try to solve the positions for himself.
Also worth mentioning, though I’m not sure if it’s a pro or con, is that some of the annotations have been truncated from their original publication. The pruning seems to be relatively minimal and (to generalize from several minutes’ research) mostly but not wholly confined to opening variations. That it isn’t mentioned is slightly disappointing, but at least it’s fairly minimal. The plus is that this may have allowed the editors to include more “games”, so overall it may be a good thing.
Should you buy it? Well, that’s for you to decide, of course, but overall I think it’s worthwhile. While it’s easy to find the games in databases, it’s not as easy to find them with great annotations, especially by the players themselves. (For instance, there are 24 “games” annotated by Kasparov; not Dokhoian, who he allowed to annotate his games for New in Chess, but the man himself.) Here, you have over 460 pages of annotated material! That the annotations are in symbols rather than words is a drawback, of course. (How much of a drawback depends on the reader. We all like and benefit from verbal descriptions, but the stronger you are the less you‘ll miss them from an instructional perspective.) The Informant repertoire of symbols is pretty thorough, but necessarily terse and antiseptic, and the reader won’t exactly get a psychologically rich account of the games.
Likewise, I think many chess fans will have fun taking a look back at the great tournaments of the past decade. There’s Kasparov’s struggles, resurgence and retirement, Anand’s & Kramnik’s ups and downs, Topalov’s explosion from perennial low-to-mid-2700 player to superstar and the emergence of young monsters like Aronian and Carlsen. But here too we only have crosstables and a few games from each event; there are no stories, recaps or any other verbal accounts to put some flesh on the bones.
All in all, it’s a nice coffee table book for chess nerds, and a book that can be used as an excellent source of training material too. If you resisted buying Informants because of the cost, this is a great way of getting much of most of the last decade’s worth of material in a single, reasonably-priced volume.
U.S. purchasing info here.
Reader Comments (8)
In addition to being emotionless, I can never quite trust Informant annotations, as:
a) They often seem rushed and superficial (though computers have undoubtedly improved things in recent years).
b) The GMs may not be fully honest about their opening innovations, wishing to gain further use from them in the future.
Miles v. Christiansen San Fransisco 1987 was of course an extreme example (poor Anand still feels the pain today)- but if Informant can fail that level of 'stress test', it shows the extent of the pinch of salt sometimes required...
You're correct that Informant annotations are imperfect in various ways, but you've drawn the wrong conclusion. The correct conclusion is that annotators have often acted as if rushed and superficial and that GMs may not be fully honest about their opening innovations - whether writing for the Informant or not.
As for Miles-Christiansen, if Anand wasn't able to spot it, why blame the Informant staff for trusting Miles and Christiansen? Anyway, that one is an innocent mistake. I'm aware of outright lies in print annotations - see for instance the self-confessed "trick" in the last note on p. 65 of Shirov's Fire on Board.
Nick Funnell's comments of course apply to all analyses by the players themselves, not just those in Informant. En passant, Dennis mentioned one strength of Shirov's books: taking a fresh look at some of his games years after the action. This is apparently missing from "TGT" - but if the Informant staff had asked the top players to re-annotate some of their games (also taking advantage of engines at their current strength?) it would have caused additional expenses, and delayed publication.
Languageless annotations - this comes as a surprise only to those who never heard of Informants before - have their pros and cons. For one thing, they increase the potential audience: not everyone can read English (of course then he/she also can't read Dennis' review), and for me Informant-style annotations are more useful than the best verbal comments in Russian!
Regarding lack of "stories, recaps or ... other verbal accounts": Adding such stuff would have gone at the expense of the pure chess content, or would have made the book thicker and more expensive. Maybe NewinChess will come up with something similar, compiling all their top tournament reports from the last decade? This would also only be beneficial to those who are "privileged" to read English .... .
Thomas,
I didn't say that there's no advantage to what the Informant people are doing. Of course there is. But I'm not asking whether we should give the Informant people three cheers for their contribution to chess (if that had been the issue, I'd be happy to lead the cheers). Rather, I'm offering a review for English-speakers and addressing the question of whether they might want to buy the book. The fact that languageless annotations are more helpful to them than great verbal comments in a language they can't read doesn't mean they should bother with either volume!
Dennis,
I was commenting on, not criticizing your review - of course it is written for an English-reading (not necessarily speaking at the same level) audience. I was merely, maybe redundantly, explaining the Informant concept. Actually, it may also increase the number of potential authors: not everyone is fluent in English (though most top players are), and translations from Russian into English are time-consuming and sometimes turn out to be sub-optimal.
Merits of verbal annotations would again become an issue if there was a competing volume from, e.g., NewinChess. There would be added value, and potential readers could choose between buying both, one or none of the books.
Thomas,
Maybe you brought up Russian because that's the/a first language of most of the world's top players, but the Informant comes out of the former Yugoslavia. So it's Serbo-Croatian that's relevant here, not Russian.
Well, the critical point is wether the annotations from this book are already or not in the previous informants or not. If not, I would buy the book immediately.
It seems to me that Savoksky is not the reference any more and is trying to catch up with many products which are actually just extractions or "revamping" of their informant. Nothing really new.
Im almost 50 years old and one year ago, I wrote to Sahovsky telling them that one improvement point would be top publish the pgn (without annotations) of the informant games. Like NIC is doing for their magazine or yearbook. By doing so, you can easily find that a game is in an informant and start your work.
I spent 2 hours, working on this email, sent it and didnt even get a reply of politeness. After this email, and being their customer for 20 years, I decided to stop buying their products.
Dennis, indeed I was thinking of the top players - among those named in your article, Kasparov, Kramnik, Aronian, Shirov (and maybe Topalov) could write in Russian, but I doubt any of them is sufficiently fluid in Serbo-Croatian. Going further back in time, Ljubojevic and Gligoric could write in Serbo-Croatian, who else among the (former) world top?
If we include chess writers in general, Wikipedia mentions 47 Russians [e.g. Dvoretsky and Shipov], 11 Ukrainians, 4 Serbians and 4 Croatians.