Book Notice: Sergei Tkachenko's *Alekhine's Odessa Secrets: Chess, War and Revolution*

You may remember Sergei Tkachenko for his (excellent) endgame study books, but apparently the Odessa native also a chess historian. In this 213 page volume he recounts the times the fourth world chess champion, Alexander Alekhine, went to Odessa and his links with that city. There are also 30 games and studies (all annotated and almost all involving Alekhine), but the book is principally narrative. I won't review the book, but the Foreword by Boris Gelfand and the material on the back cover will give you a good idea about the contents of the book and whether you're likely to find it interesting:

Gelfand's Foreword:

Dear Reader, you have in your hands a new book by the wonderful chess composer and historian Sergei Tkachenko, an Odessa native. It contains an account of the part of fourth world champion Alexander Alekhine's life that was connected to Odessa and Odessites.

Each sentence in Sergei's book reflects his great love for his hometown. The author is driven by his immense desire to establish the historical truth of those events where the great Russian chess player took center stage.

I found this book so fascinating that I read it virtually non-stop! Not only did I learn about previously unknown episodes of Alekhine's life, but I was also introduced to long-forgotten Odessa chess players who were colleagues of the future chess king. They helped to found the famous Odessa chess school that would provide the world with a slew of outstanding grandmasters, including Efim Geller, Vladimir Tukmakov, Lev Albert [sic - Alburt], and Konstantin Lerner.

Yet Sergei's book is not limited to historical sketches. It also analyzes little-known games played by Alekhine from the time he spent in Odessa. Several of them struck me with the beauty of the combinations so typical of the world champion.

I am sure that you, dear Reader, will feel as much pleasure reading Alekhine's Odessa Secrets: Chess, Warn and Revolution as I did!

Back Cover:

Sergei Tkachenko has written a fascinating account of Alexander Alekhine's time spent in Odessa during World War I, the Russian Revolution and Civil war, as well as of the impact of Odessa on his later life. Sergei, an Odessa native and ex-world chess composition champion, has carried out original research drawing from Odessa, Voronezh, Cheka and KGB archives among others, as well as local newspapers from the time. His research, together with a review of Russian-language secondary materials, has dug up lots of new information and analysis on Alekhine, including on his trips to Odessa and their reasons, is service during World War I, his interrogations by the Cheka and his ties to the White Movement. Sergei portrays Alekhine's Odessa relatives and the Odessite chess masters against whom he played a number of friendly and simultaneous games during his three trips to the Ukrainian city.

Sergei provides a detailed description of chess in Odessa from the beginning of the nineteenths century and through the upheavals of the early twentieth century, including the city's leading chess organizers, the main and university chess clubs, and even high society's chess-themed ballroom parties. He goes on to describe the chaos under Bolshevik rule during the Civil War, during which Alekhine was arrested by the Reds and very nearly executed. The author reviews the backdrop to Alekhine's arrest and investigates the circumstances of his last-minute release. His heart-rendering [sic - rending] account of terror by the Cheka brings home to the reader how near the chess world was to losing its greatest player of the first half of the twentieth century.

The book then goes on to review the strong Odessa links with key events surrounding Alekhine later - his exile, failing marriages, plans for a match with Botvinnik, murky death and eventual burial 10 years later.

Book Notice: The Linders' *Alexander Alekhine: Fourth World Chess Champion*

Isaak and Vladimir Linder, Alexander Alekhine: Fourth World Chess Champion. Russell Enterprises, 2016. 295 pp., $24.95.

Alexander Alekhine was one of the all-time greats: world champion for 15 years (from 1927 until his death in 1946, excepting Max Euwe's reign from 1935 to 1937), arguably the most diligent analyst of the pre-WWII era, and one of the great opening innovators of the era as well. He may have been the greatest blindfold player of all time, and his incredible tactical imagination has probably made him a greater fan favorite than any other player in history, pre-Mikhail Tal. Alekhine was the chess hero of the young Garry Kasparov, and one can see the resemblance between the two of them.

Despite his greatness and importance to the game, there aren't a lot of good books on Alekhine in English. Alekhine's own best games volume (or volumes: 1908-1923 and 1924-1937, but they are often published in a combined volume) is indispensable for chess fans, and there's also the monster book on Alekhine by Verhoeven and Skinner. Neither is really a biography, but one can find biographical information in the relevant volume of Kasparov's My Great Predecessors series.

The book under review fills in a gap, but it may be more accurate to describe the book as a short encyclopedia on Alexander Alekhine. This is the third in a series of biographies of early world chess champions by the father and son duo of Isaak and Vladimir Linder (I reviewed their work on Emanuel Lasker here, and on Jose Raul Capablanca here), and it is similar to the earlier works.

The book's format might prove irritating to readers who come to it expecting anything like a traditional biography, but if instead one thinks of it as an encyclopedia one is much less likely to be disappointed. The first chapter, "Life and Destiny", looks like it will be a straight biography, but then the Linders discuss his life in this country, then that one, then a third - and the dates are all over the place. If one moves the puzzle pieces around one could construct a linear account, but it isn't provided from the material as-is.

Chapter 2, "Matches, Tournaments, Rivals" is largely chronological, but not entirely, and there is no narrative structure; each entry is an independent, self-contained unit. Short biographies are offered of various players, sometimes including games they played against opponents other than Alekhine. Event summaries are also provided, often with crosstables and sometimes with historic photos.

The entries in this section are often fascinating, and it will be the very rare reader who doesn't learn something new. I had never heard of a player named Alexander Moiseyevich Evenson (1892-1919), but it turns out that he was a very talented player who died young, possibly killed by his fellow soliders in the post-war army. How talented was Evenson? You might suspect that if you've never heard of him he probably wasn't such a big deal, so how's this: after St. Petersburg 1914 (won by Lasker, ahead of Capablanca, Alekhine, etc.) there was a blitz tournament. Capablanca won, and Evenson was second, ahead of Lasker, Alekhine, and others.

Chapter 2 is by far the longest chapter in the book; chapter 3 is a bit of an odds-and-ends chapter on Alekhine's chess, entitled "Chess Creations - Games and Discoveries". Chapter 4, "Writer and Journalist", explores his considerable contributions to the literature of the game, and Chapter 5, "Impervious to Time", considers his legacy.

I think this is a worthwhile book for fans of chess history, and even if you're a Russian in possession of the original you might still find it worth picking up, as the game annotations for this edition have been done by German grandmaster Karsten Mueller. (136 games and game fragments in total, and almost all of them complete games.) Recommended.

The Current World Chess Column: On Blindfold Chess

Later this year Timur Gareyev will try to break Marc Lang's record for the most blindfold games played simultaneously (Lang's record is 46; Gareyev will try to outdo this by one), but how will he fare from an aesthetic standpoint? In my current column I take a look at several of Alexander Alekhine's nicest blindfold efforts, each of which made it into his Best Games collection.

This Week's World Chess Column: On the Dilemma of the Horns

In this week's column I look at a pawn structure that "hit the big time" thanks to the great Akiba Rubinstein, and trace a little of its evolution to the present day.

This Week's World Chess Column: The Unloved Draw

My column this week takes a look at the scourge of chess: the draw. After looking at some examples of the kinds of draws we all hate (at least most of the time), and a pair of amusing examples, it's easy to forget that it is possible for a draw to be not only (at least) as well-played as a won game, but every bit as hard fought and exciting, too. To remind us that such games are possible, the column concludes with a look at one of the famous draws of all time (at least in the pre-internet era), the so-called Immortal Draw between Alexander Alekhine and Richard Reti. Draws like that are worth more to chess history than many a tournament's worth of wins.

Silman on Alekhine

This is the final installment of a seven-part series on Alexander Alekhine by Jeremy Silman over on chess.com. The series is interesting for its chess content, but this particular part is more important for its discussion of the anti-Semitic articles written by Alekhine during the Second World War. Silman's discussion is thoughtful and charitable, and to my mind goes a long way towards clearing this significant stain on the former champion's reputation. It's pretty close to a must-read for anyone with an interest in chess history.

Book Notice: Alekhine's My Best Games of Chess 1908-1937

Alexander Alekhine, My Best Games of Chess 1908-1937 (Russell Enterprises 2013). $34.95. 454 pp. Reviewed by Dennis Monokroussos.

So-called descriptive notation offers an inelegant and ugly way of recording the moves of a chess game, but that's the way things were in English-language chess publications for at least the first 2/3 to 3/4 of the 20th century. That it is gone is progress, and not just for the benefits of a worldwide lingua franca. Nevertheless, before we say a complete "good riddance" to the old ways, we should note that many great English-language chess books have been written in descriptive notation, and not all of them have been updated into algebraic versions. Further, many of those golden oldies are available at very reasonable prices - Dover publishing in particular is a fine source of old chess books.

One such book - or originally, pair of books - is the two-part autobiographical collection of Alexander Alekhine's Best Games of Chess. Volume 1 covers his career from 1908 to 1923, the sequel from 1924 to 1937. The games are fantastic, and Alekhine was unparalleled in his day as an annotator in his analytical depth and creativity. When I was a kid back in the 1970s I had the volumes as separate paperbacks, each of which was purchased for fewer than $10 a pop. Years later, coming back to the game and rebuilding my library, I discovered that the version I owned was unavailable. Subsequently, there were two developments: one very bad, and one that was very good.

First, the bad. John Nunn, then one of the leaders of Batsford Publishing, produced a severely abridged version that included only 109 of the original 220 games. (There were an additional nine games thrown in covering the last part of Alekhine's careeer.) Worse still, it cost more than double the price of the original - a great deal for the publisher, but a crime against a classic and a loss to the chess lover. The version at least updated the notation to algebraic, but beyond that it was a low moment in chess publishing. Then, good news: the original Dover edition was reissued in a combined volume, and at a very reasonable price. (Checking Amazon.com at the moment, it goes for $17.96 for their basic price, and lower prices are available through individual sellers.) The drawback is that it's in descriptive notation, just like the original. For those of us who are "bilingual", that's not a problem at all, but some will find descriptive notation too odious to learn and use.

If so, then here at last is good news: Russell Enterprises is now publishing a fresh, unabridged edition in algebraic notation. Here's a quick list of what I see as the primary pros and cons of their new edition relative to the old Dover standard.

Pros:

• Algebraic notation
• Spiffier pages
• More diagrams
• Lots of photographs of both Alekhine and his various opponents

Cons:

• Price: The new edition goes for $34.95 - not an intrinsically bad price at all given the book's size and quality, but it's still double the basic retail price of the original.
• Upside-down diagrams in Alekhine's black games. (Some people seem to like such diagrams, but I'm not one of them. It's probably a conservative estimate to say that 99.5% of diagrams in chess literature are given from White's point of view, so why introduce such a distracting element here? This isn't some avant-garde book by Adorjan exclaiming that Black is OK; it's a canonical text which is being updated in large part to overcome the annoyance and distraction many will find with descriptive notation. Why introduce a fresh new way of alienating the audience?)

Finally, let me offer huge kudos to Taylor Kingston and the publisher for offering a terrific resource that, strictly speaking, isn't part of the book. One feature of Nunn's abridgment was a large number of footnotes pointing out analytical errors committed by Alekhine. The errors were certainly there to be noted, but as a book that isn't just historical and instructional but also inspirational, the heavy footnotes weren't the best fit. What Kingston and Russell Enterprises have done is to post an analytical errata file online. (And it's a huge PDF file at that, weighing in at a dense 63 pages!) This is a nice way to give readers the chance to enjoy Alekhine's notes on their own merits and to challenge motivated readers to find the errors on their own, which they can then check online. Finally, it's a public service to chess fans in general, who can look up the file on their own without owning this edition of the book.

I haven't said much about the book itself, and perhaps wrongly so. Not everyone who reads this blog knows all about Alexander Alekhine and his chess. I will be overly brief here, but hopefully say enough to encourage you to buy the book. First of all, he was the world chess champion from 1927 to 1935, and then from 1937 until his death in 1946. He was a player of a brilliant combinational style - stylistically he more than anyone else influenced Garry Kasparov. He was the one of the first really deep investigators of the opening, and the breadth of his contributions to that phase of the game is astounding. Really, he was the first true chess professional, as measured by his analytical investigations of the opening and in annotation, and in his self-disciplined, experimental approach to self-improvement. In the book you will find technical and strategic masterpieces, but above all you will find dazzling chess ideas produced by a man with an explosively fecund imagination for the game. It's a chess book every club player ought to have, and it's a great book to give to kids to help inspire them about chess. (At least if you can get them off their electronics long enough to read a book.) So the only question is which edition to get: the old one if you want to save a few bucks and don't mind descriptive notation, or this newer and neater one. (To help you decide, here's an excerpt from the new version.)

A New Super-Tournament: The Alekhine Memorial

There have been various Alekhine Memorials over the years (most famously in 1971, co-won by the young Anatoly Karpov and Leonid Stein), but this is the first one that's a super-tournament in the contemporary sense. It will take place from April 21 to May 1 in two locations, opening in Paris, France and concluding in St. Petersburg, Russia. As far as I know, that too is a first for an Alekhine Memorial, but it makes a certain sense as Alexander Alekhine lived in both countries (though in his case he started in Russia and went to France). Here is the participant list:

• Viswanathan Anand
• Vladimir Kramnik (who is Russian but lives in France!)
• Levon Aronian
• Peter Svidler
• Boris Gelfand (so far, the list includes the world champion and half the candidates)
• Maxime Vachier-Lagrave
• Laurent Fressinet
• Michael Adams
• Nikita Vitiugov
• Ding Liren

(HT: Chess Today)