It is amazing how my thread got hi-jacked with all this tournament book discussion.   

That is ok.  I'll mention one myself.  The new one by Jan Timman, Curacao 1962.  I just got it a week or so ago.  I don't know that it will be a true classic because some of the annotations have the whiff of being an afterthought.  Perhaps that isn't fair because I only just got the book.  Still,  I will already state that it is a book well worth getting.  This was a fascinating and important event and if you love chess history (and historical photographs) that is reason enough to get it.

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Thanks, Smyslov_Fan.  I actually have the Speelman book. 

Bile?  IT IS KORCHNOI!!  Of course there is bile.     Should we think less of Alekhine's game collections because he was an arrogant jerk who fabricated some of his game scores?  Should we think less of Smyslov's games because they are so dull?      I am a fan or Korchnoi's and I stand by my recommendation of those books.

However, I made a mistake.   It is very hard to single one collection out.   There are so many good ones.  Still, I don't know how the two Keres' volumes that Markovich mentioned escaped my mind.  Those are great, great books that I think more players could profit from then the Korchnoi volumes.

Kere's selected games of chess annotated by himself, currently published in two volumes named, respectively Paul Keres: The Quest for Perfection and Paul Keres: The Road to the Top, constitute by far the best game collection that I have ever read.

I learned a great deal about chess from reading the Great Man's ideas, which address not only technical issues but fighting considerations too.  The analyses are neither too detailed nor too sparse. 

These volumes basically reprint, in alebraic notation, a previous three-volume set brilliantly edited by Harry Golombek, and the absence of Golombek's name from the cover is deeply offensive to the gods.  Instead all the ostensible credit goes to John Nunn, whose main contribution seems to have been to check Kere's analyses with a computer and point out his occasional mistakes.  Nunn does, at least, provide a few extra games and does mention Golombek in his introduction. 

I do suspect that the decision to omit Golombek's deserved credit was not Nunn's, but Batsford's.

I also think that Frank Marshall's My Fifty Years of Chess is a cheerful and entertaining collection. It brims with sharp tactics and crafty swindles.

Well Castlerock,

You're the first to have given How to Learn from Your Mistakes a thumbs up!  I own it and did profit from some of the analysis of Larsen's games (Scandinavian and Petrov's openings), but the most interesting losses had almost no notes whatsoever.  I wouldn't rank it as one of the great books.  I did however neglect a whole slew of great books including collections by Nunn, Geller, Kramnik, Gelfand (mentioned elsewhere), Capa, Bronstein, Keres, Kasparov, Botvinnik, Anand....

As I said, the list of great books seems endless!

Btw Prince-Nez,

Huebner's book was published in English but is almost impossible to find these days.  You might be able to find Jon Speelman's Best Games which also has about ten pages per game worth of notes!

Korchnoi's two volumes My Best Games is an exercise in bile.  He berates his opponents and complains that they don't understand the most basic principles of opening/positional/endgame play.  His game selection isn't even "great".  His 400 Games contains many better games and more objective analysis.

Sure, we could start a separate thread for tournament books, though I'm afraid Zurich and Santa Monica '66 would garner 90% of the votes.

I'll give my favorite collections, then ones that I think are overrated, then what I'm going through now, then what I want to see, but haven't yet. 

Favorite collections:  I like the Larsen collection.  I was just playing through one of his Bird games earlier today against Spassky, where he plays 1. f4 d5 2. Nf3 Nf6 3. e3 g6 4. b5!? 

Tal's best games are great.  It's so anecdotally written that it's fun just to read through without hardly a reference to the actual chess, though that, being Tal, is of course exciting stuff.

I've always had a soft spot for Keres' collection, maybe just because it was my first one.  I like Nimzovich's "collection" at the back of _My System_, though I'm afraid my chess was worse after playing those games, because his style is contagious and dogmatic.  Uhlman's _Winning with the French_ is probably the one I've played through the most, though of course all the games are Frenches. 

Overrated:  I imagine a lot of people are going to say Fisher's 60 games, but that one was always too dry for me.  Most of the actual English seems like it's in one word sentences, "Not", "but", "intending", etc.

Current collection:  the one I'm playing through now is a combined volume of Alekhines best games, I and II.  I like his games because they seem so simple compared to modern games, so that it's easy to see how he executes his plans.  However, he's something of a snotty annotator.  He loves to make Capablanca look bad; he loves to give short, cryptic "explanations" that can sometimes be tough to figure out but certainly demonstrate how smart he is; he loves to give a move an exclamation mark and then twenty moves later say "The point!" to prove he saw that far ahead.  Still, I'm getting a lot out of it.

Next collection:  I'd love to get Botvinnik's collected games, but yow, those books are expensive.  What's with Botvinnik?  Why, of all world champions, are his games worth so much more moolah than anyone else's?  I particular want them for his French and Dutch Stonewall games, so rats.

I assume *Game Collection* does not necessarily mean same player's games. My favourite is Zurich International. I have just ordered Understanding Chess Move by Move, based on a recommendation from a GM. Any views?