Jim West On Chess: Review: "The Inner Game of Chess"

Thursday, January 1, 2015

Review: "The Inner Game of Chess"

Grandmaster Andy Soltis has revised The Inner Game of Chess [Mongoose Press, 2014, 324 pages], originally published 20 years earlier.

New games Kamsky-Mamedyarov, World Cup 2013; Ivanchuk-Harikrishna, FIDE World Championship 2004; Carlsen-Anand, Moscow 2013; Nisipeanu-Ivanchuk, FIDE World Championship 1999; and Sasikiran-Short, Skanderborg 2003 have been added.

According to the author: "Chess is really 99 percent calculation - the inner game of chess."

The Table Of Contents includes chapters on calculation, ideas, and analytical trees.

Because each game teaches a valuable lesson, I intend to use this book in coaching my students.

"My study of chess was accompanied by a strong attraction to music, and it was probably thanks to this that from childhood I became accustomed to thinking of chess as an art, and have never regarded it as anything else, for all the science and sport involved in it. And, moreover, an art which in some ways is closer to music than it is customary to think. Perhaps chess and music are drawn together by laws of harmony and beauty which are difficult to formulate and difficult to grasp, or perhaps by something else." - Vasily Smyslov