The best, the worst, the shortest, the oddest, the longest, the most deceitful, the most memorable, the most brilliant, the dumbest--of players, games, matches, tournaments, books, ideas, etc. The lists are replete with background detail and exact facts--this second edition of Soltis's classic 1984 book is altogether an essential part of any chess collection and a browser's delight. The new edition contains 25 percent more lists, games, diagrams and annotations. The majority of lists from the first edition have been updated or expanded--or both.

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 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.

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.