The rules of "The Greatest Tournament in Chess History," the $20 million Sheldrake Memorial Tournament, a.k.a. Los Voraces 2019, are: no seconds, no agents, no computers, no entourages, no pagers, no power palms, no phone calls--no outside contact of any kind--as the fourteen greatest chess players in the world gather to compete for money and fame. These geniuses of the game are strange characters--including two Russian world champions solely responsible for article 17.1 of FIDE's Laws of Chess (the "anti-hair-pull rule"), the Rumanian who speaks a "kind of personal Esperanto, using odds and ends of other languages," and a possible member of the Russian mafia--and when the tournament begins with the death of the ninth highest rated player in the world, everyone is under suspicion. This fabulous chess novel is full of game scores and diagrams--some pretty amazing games are played at Los Voraces! It's all told from the point of view of the arbiter, who is quickly drawn from his role as observer to that of target and suspect. By the time the tournament has only five rounds to go, five corpses have been discovered. Just who is the serial killer with a preference for 2700+ rated grandmasters? This edition is a revision, with illustrations, of a serialized electronic version run by Hanon Russell on ChessCafe from September 2001 to September 2002.

This is the autobiography of chess grandmaster and journalist Andy Soltis, one of the very few grandmasters who had a professional career outside of the game, and a prolific author of chess-related nonfiction. It describes how chess and journalism fought for his time for more than 50 years and how he managed to score coups and make blunders in each field. Among his distinctions: He is the only person who has both interviewed Donald Trump and played chess with (and nearly beat!) Bobby Fischer.

A crucial decision spared chess Grandmaster David Bronstein almost certain death at the hands of the Nazis--one fateful move cost him the world championship. Russian champion Mark Taimanov was a touted as a hero of the Soviet state until his loss to Bobby Fischer all but ruined his life. Yefim Geller's dream of becoming world champion was crushed by a bad move against Fischer, his hated rival. Yuri Averbakh had no explanation how he became the world's oldest grandmaster, other than the quixotic nature of fate. Vasily Smyslov, the only one of the five to become world champion, would reign for just one year--fortune, he said, gave him pneumonia at the worst possible time. This book explores how fate played a capricious role in the lives of five of the greatest players in chess history.

This book describes the intense rivalry--and collaboration--of the four players who created the golden era when USSR chess players dominated the world. More than 200 annotated games are included, along with personal details--many for the first time in English. Mikhail Tal, the roguish, doomed Latvian who changed the way chess players think about attack and sacrifice; Tigran Petrosian, the brilliant, henpecked Armenian whose wife drove him to become the world's best player; Boris Spassky, the prodigy who survived near-starvation and later bouts of melancholia to succeed Petrosian--but is best remembered for losing to Bobby Fischer; and "Evil" Viktor Korchnoi, whose mixture of genius and jealousy helped him eventually surpass his three rivals (but fate denied him the title they achieved: world champion).

This large and magnificent work of art is both an interpretive history of Soviet chess from the Bolshevik Revolution to the collapse of the U.S.S.R. in 1991 and a record of the most interesting games played. The text traces the phenomenal growth of chess from the Revolutionary days to the devastations of World War II, and then from the Golden Age of Soviet-dominated chess in the 1950s to the challenge of Bobby Fischer and the quest to find his Soviet match. Included are 249 games, each with a diagram; most are annotated and many have never before been published outside the Soviet Union. The text is augmented by photographs and includes 63 tournament and match scoretables. Also included are a bibliography, an appendix of records achieved in Soviet national championships, two indexes of openings, and an index of players and opponents.

This is the most complete and thorough biography of Jose Raul Capablanca, one of the greatest players in the history of chess. Beginning with his family background, birth, childhood and introduction to the game in Cuba, it examines his life and play as a young man; follows his evolution as a player and rise to prominence, first as challenger and then world champion; his loss of the title to Alekhine and his efforts to recapture the championship in the last years of his too-short life. What emerges is a portrait of a complex man with far-ranging interests and concerns, in stark contrast to his robotic reputation as "the chess machine." Meticulously researched, utilizing many sources available only in Capablanca's home country, it puts truth to legend regarding a man who stood astride the chess world in of its most dynamic and dramatic eras. Numerous games and diagrams complement the text, as do a wealth of photographs.

The games of Mikhail Botvinnik, world chess champion from 1948 to 1963, have been studied by players around the world for decades. But little has been written about Botvinnik himself. This book explores his unusual dual career--as a highly regarded scientist as well as the first truly professional chess player--as well as his complex relations with Soviet leaders, including Josef Stalin, his bitter rivalries, and his doomed effort to create the perfect chess-playing computer program. The book has more than 85 games, 127 diagrams, twelve photographs, a chronology of his life and career, a bibliography, an index of openings, an index of opponents, and a general index.