Chess Movies 2: The Sequel
Bruce Pandolfini's Chess Movies 1: Quick Tricks was by far the worst chess book I've ever seen; offensively bad, frankly. Fortunately, the sequel, subtitled The Means and Ends, is considerably better. The first volume presented 64 absolutely AWFUL games of no more than six moves; this one presents the final moves of 64 real games - high-level games by top players.
The finishing moves of these games demonstrate some instructive or aesthetically pleasing point, though generally the punchline is better characterized as "neat" or clever than beautiful. It's a decent collection as far as it goes, and would make a good start to a better, more traditionally designed book. (On the other hand, even that better book would fall far short of a really fantastic book, Van Perlo's brilliant Endgame Tactics. If you don't have it, get it: both the chess - over 1100 bright, beautiful examples - and the writing are a joy to behold.)
The series is titled "Chess Movies" because of the conceit of including a diagram after every half-move, and to my mind this space-wasting gimmick is an excellent reason why two volumes is two too many. It's absolutely ridiculous to charge $20 (ok, $19.95...plus tax and shipping) for 353 moves stretched to fill 188 pages. There are brief comments after every move, which ought not to be confused with analysis. (Curiously, Pandolfini does on occasionally offers some extremely brief analysis. But how in the world does he expect us to follow these 1-2 move variations without diagrams?) Generally the comments are simple but relevant, but sometimes they are empty filler. (If there's an award for most instructive commentary sentence in a chess book, the line "Take that, you defenseless king, you!" is bound to be the runaway winner.)
I'm not sure who the target audience is for this book. The very simple comments and incessant diagrams suggest a pretty low level (or a good player with incredibly poor visualization skills), but the examples have enough sophistication that they would be better appreciated by a somewhat stronger player. Maybe a scholastic player rated around 1000 might find the book as designed interesting, but for that audience I think they'll find Pandolfini's writing a bit dry; I think the over-the-top enthusiasm of old Fred Reinfeld books might be better for working up their excitement.
In sum, this book is far better than the first volume, but I can't really recommend it either. Get the Van Perlo book instead.
Reader Comments (2)
"But how in the world does he expect us to follow these 1-2 move variations without diagrams?"
Obviously this comment is sarcastic, but it would take an absolute beginner(even very weak players that are familiar to the game could do this) to not be able to visualize 2 moves ahead. Even then, they could set it up on their board and do without a diagram every half move. I think the idea of having a diagram every half move is pretty silly. Not only would it get really repetitive and annoying to look at so many diagrams, it's probably doing your chess improvement a disservice. How are you going to practice visualization when you have a diagram every half move?
This is a sad story with the diagrams in chess books.
I think a player of >1900 ELO should be able to play at least 4-5 moves in his head,
but in most books the diagrams happen to be much more sparse.
Eg. in "My Great Predecessors" (I am reading Alekhin's games at the moment) you can sometimes read 15-20 moves without a new diagram. You need to setup a chessboard but this is NOT AT ALL PRACTICAL in most of the cases (there is no time usually).
Dennis, the line
"Bruce Pandolfini's Chess Movies 1: Quick Tricks was by far the worst chess book I've ever seen;"
is increasing one's curiosity about the book ! :-) WORST CHESS BOOK EVER = that's interesting ! :-)
[DM: I know what you mean, but the bad news is that it isn't bad in an interesting or amusing way either. Anyway, you can preview the book on Amazon.com (hopefully the preview is available in your area) and see for yourself. It's like a very poor man's version of Chernev's 1000 Best Short Games of Chess.]