The Chess Informant goes back to 1966 and its core remains the same: a collection of recent games, generally annotated by the players themselves or strong members of the Informant staff. But the periodical has evolved as well, changing with the times and under different editorial boards. The previous publishing team has moved on helm the American Chess Magazine, and Informant 134 is the first issue under the new leadership group. How has it fared?
It bears the marks of a periodical in transition. As usual, there are 200 annotated games (symbols only, no natural language) that constitute the traditional meat of the volume. Most of the annotations are by staffers, with about half of the games worked on by GMs and half by IMs. The summary of tournaments played during the relevant period (September-November 2017) is there, along with the best game of the previous volume (Viswanathan Anand’s impressive win over Fabiano Caruana from the Sinquefield Cup), the best theoretical novelty from the previous volume, and sections for solving on combinations, endings, and studies. The combination and endings sections were a little disappointing though. Some of the “combinations” were exceptionally easy, including even one-movers, while more than several endings had additional solutions (all of which went unmentioned). On the other hand, the studies section was a winner, featuring the great contemporary composer Oleg Pervakov. (Some readers might recall his Studies for Practical Players, co-authored by Mark Dvoretsky. And if you need more encouragement to dig into Pervakov’s work, you’ll find some extremely high praise here.)
The last entry in the symbols-only part of the issue is a “Best of” dedicated to Fabiano Caruana – a sort of mini-Informant devoted to his best achievements. 59 of his best games are included, along with seven especially important theoretical novelties he introduced, 17 “excellent moves and combinations”, and 10 of his best endings. (About the endings: Anish Giri vs. Caruana from Wijk aan Zee 2015 makes sense as an example of resilient defense by Caruana, but as an exercise it’s an oddity. Only one position is offered to the solver, and it’s Giri’s first move, 58 moves before the end, and it’s an absolutely obvious move.)
On to the “talky” part of the book. Here’s where we feel the presence of the new team – or perhaps the absence of the old one. All but one of the articles is by players from the former Yugoslavia (six from Serbia, one from Montenegro), with the remaining article being part two of a series by Russian GM Jakov Geller. There’s nothing wrong with that, especially as the authors are all GMs, a couple rated over 2600. But it’s hard to replace the sorts of authors who showed up under the previous administration: Garry Kasparov, Alexander Morozevich, Shakhriyar Mamedyarov, Michael Adams, Baskaran Adhiban, Emanuel Berg, and Karsten Mueller, to name just some of the most prestigious authors to write multiple columns for the Informant. I’m hopeful that the absence of star guests is due to the difficulties of the transition and not a sign of things to come. (A slight caveat, and a positive one: rising star and budding super-GM Jan-Krzysztof Duda guest-annotates three of his games under the aegis of another columnist’s piece. Kudos to the new team for this “get”!)
Anyway, it’s better to describe the book they’ve written and not the book the reviewer wishes they’d written. So here’s what we do have in this issue:
It’s still a valuable periodical, and if you subscribed to it before there’s no reason to skip this issue. While this issue wasn’t as strong as many of the other recent issues, it’s still worthwhile, and hopefully the new team can successfully build on legacy of their predecessors.
More info on the issue here.