A Short Review of Hansen's *Marvelous Modern Miniatures*
Every now and again, publishers send unsolicited books for me to review. I would prefer that they stop doing this, but, having received the books, I will say something about them.
First, Carsten Hansen's Marvelous Modern Miniatures: 2020 Games in 20 Moves or Less. One of my favorite old books is Irving Chernev's 1000 Best Short Games of Chess. It's an unpretentious work that Edward Winter probably wouldn't deem worthy to clean his boots, but I like it for a specific purpose. (Or two: the games are entertaining.) Every few years I'll use the book as a tool for blindfold chess exercise, trying to follow the games mentally from start to finish, and further trying to figure out the winning combination before "seeing" it played. The games are short, starting from a four-move game at the start, if I recall correctly, going up to 24-move games by the book's end.
I am therefore a fan of the concept, and Hansen's book has roughly twice as many games - all featuring strong players (2100 as the absolute minimum, and it appears that the vast majority of games feature GMs). Moreover, the games are annotated, too, in distinction from Chernev's chatty style. So this new book should be even better, right?
In some respects it is, but overall I'm inclined to say no. I think this is one of those "the medium is the message" situations. Most miniatures are miniatures because someone screwed up royally. Not always, of course, but most of the time - both in Chernev's book and in this one. So a collection of miniatures - especially a massive collection of them - should be enjoyed. It should be a book for entertainment, not something that pretends to be a serious collection of games worth analyzing. It's the sort of book you want to read in bed or while watching TV - something to relax with, smiling at the foibles of elite players or enjoying an attractive or surprising combination bringing a game to an abrupt end. Making it serious-ish undermines the whole point of the thing. If I want to look at annotated games, I'm going to look at great games - at classics - or if I'm in a utilitarian mood I'll see what the latest periodical has to say about the openings I work on.
Worse: when I've used some of the games from Hansen's book with my students, I've repeatedly found analytical errors. My suspicion is that he has been collecting these games for many years, and analyzed them with the engines available at that time. This is a peril for all of us: I've checked old analyses of my own games, or of games I recorded for various shows, and have often found today's engines radically disagreeing with the earlier assessments. For that matter, I was able to find big improvements on even Garry Kasparov's analyses within several years of the publication of his various My Great Predecessors volumes. It's the nature of the beast: engines are absurdly strong and getting stronger by the day. Kasparov isn't to blame for that, unless he has a time machine, and neither is any other conscientious analyst whose work is later found to have errors. But it does put an author like Hansen in a bit of a bind (assuming my diagnosis is correct): it's a pain in the neck to check 2000 games for publication, but if you don't there are likely to be lots of errors.
So I think the book loses something by trying to straddle two very different genres: the book is a little too serious for an entertainment book, but not serious enough for a substance-first book. One other issue, which will be very person-relative. A chess book with more than 2000 games, even when they are miniatures, will either be large enough to function as a doorstop or require very small print. I think the publisher did a good job of trying to balance the trade-offs; even so, some readers might find the print a little small for their taste and the three-column format too busy. C'est la vie: it's either somewhat small print or lug an unabridged dictionary around with you.
Two other points of comparison in Chernev's favor. First, with a longer time frame Chernev could select games that have stood the test of time, while the overwhelming majority of Hansen's games were played in this millennium. Some of these recent games are quite nice, but many are just games where one side blunders and the other player takes advantage in prosaic fashion. Second, with an upper limit of 20 moves in an era with increased opening knowledge, the crisis and the denouement are typically very brief. There's often more of a "story" in the games in Chernev's book.
That's the bad news. Now let's turn to the good news. First, the book can be used for the same purpose as I use with the Chernev book. And this is mostly a plus: every game has a diagram at one of the critical moments, which means that you know where to look for a tactic (which makes the work an exercise book even if you don't bother with the blindfold task), and because the diagram is there it's harder to accidentally see the right move if you're trying to solve it. (The drawback, if you're doing the blindfold exercise, is that you know there's something there at that moment.) More good news: the book is sorted by opening, and that makes it handy for those who want to search for their favorite lines seeking traps to set and avoid. And while the analysis isn't always perfect, it's still useful and illuminating.
In sum: I would prefer to split the genres and have books that excel in each rather than trying to straddle the fence with a 2-in-1 work. Even so, this isn't a bad work, and I can recommend it to those who might want to use it for blindfold work or a little light reading - at least if you have young eyes.
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