OstapBender wrote on 02/17/09 at 17:49:26:


I don't know, but I do know that he and Shamkovich co-authored a book on the Schliemann with 5...Nf6, which was a very definite stinker.  The same position was considered twice, reaching opposite conclusions.  

He once wrote a book where he cited some of my work on Hardchess, but never gave the source as anything other than "Morss."  His readers, if any, must have wondered who this Morss was.

But Schiller-bashing is just too easy.  It really contributes little here to dwell on his miserable works.

About that story, I wonder why Silman thought that Benko would be an apt attack dog.

Bonsai wrote on 02/16/09 at 22:16:03:


Interesting to read this.  I agree about Dunnington's book in particular.

In general I think that presenting opening theory by means of a series of entire games is a method very easy for authors to abuse.  Not always but often, you get distressingly slight consideration of important sidelines and not very thorough analysis even of the positions that are covered.  Further I think that seeing games played out to the bitter end is an overrated in openings preparation.  How the ending was played is nice to know but very often space-wasting (not always, I admit).  Also authors using this method of presentation can very easily evade considering the most difficult questions.  Finally this method of presentation makes it much more difficult to tell, perusing the work in a bookstore, whether it is actually of any value.  That is one of its purposes, I suppose.  The best supereficial indication is that the commentary is lengthy and dense with variations.

On the other side I admit that there are some very worthy books that present the material in this way; Golubev's on the KID for example.

Want my take on it? Books written by Eric Schiller often suck. That is because the analysis is extremely superficial, there are many spelling errors, wrong diagrams, etc. When someone else (Joel Benjamin, for example) co-authors Schiller's books, it is not as bad. The co-author sometimes makes sure there are no typos. But more often than not, Schiller's books are so poorly written that he has a reputation for sloppy writing.

My number one worst book (amongst those books I actually worked on) is Konikowsky's book on the Scandinavian, which (a) seemed to primarily copy other sources (e.g. Wahls), (b) assessed the same position differently depending on the move order (claiming that one variation with 2...Qxd5 that Wahls dismisses is indeed just bad, but claiming that the same position is fine if reached by a 2...Nxd5 mover order is fine for black), (c) completely fails to grasp/present/discuss any of the fine points that various other authors took into account (Wahls, Emms etc.) and (d) being completely wrong about several key assessments of positions (usually wrongly claiming that black is fine).

Then there's Karpov's books on the English and the Grunfeld (I have both in German, the 1992 edition "Siegen mit Grünfeld Indisch" and a 1999 "Englisch")? Both claim to cover the current theory (all sorts of bla, bla, bla on the backcover), but in fact simply provide some annotated games in a few selected lines Karpov played (in particular against Kasparov). Well, if they were at least inspiringly annotated high-level games that would just be dishonest about the content, but the presentation also lack any appeal to me.

Then there's Winning with the Torre Attack by Gufeld and Stetsko, which to me stands out as an example of how to abuse the complete games format by simply providing a random selection of games in certain variations without and logically ordered presentation or overall messages.

A honourable mentioning also goes to Attacking with 1.d4 by Angus Dunnington, which is inspiringly written and did make me try a lot of the interesting ideas shown in the book, but which consistently fails to analyze the best lines for black (in particular simply dismissing what the best known specialists in each opening for black play - e.g. in the case of the Chigorin Morozevich or Milandinovic etc.).

Smyslov_Fan wrote on 02/16/09 at 18:29:36:


I don't know about Suetin, but the really awful thing about Kotov's Play Like a Grandmaster is its completely unrealistic model of how to analyze trees of variations.  Kotov argues that you should never revisit a single branch once you've reached a conclusion about it, but rather that you ascertain chess truth once and for all along every branch.  What people actually do, and what indeed is rational to do, is to go back and forth among various branches in distinctly unmachinelike manner, updating analyses done earlier with what was learned in later analyses.

Quote:


Don't stop there - there are three other classics by Plaskett. Here are some brutal (and funny) reviews. Having flicked through them at a tournament bookstall (I didn't buy them), I can say that they are not exaggerating -

Catastrophe in the Opening and Queen's Bishop Attack Revealed - http://www.chesscafe.com/text/hansen76.pdf

I've never seen this one, but the review is highly amusing. 

Starting Out: Attacking play - http://www.chessville.com/reviews/StartingOutAttackingPlay.htm

Please don't buy this:

http://www.amazon.com/Scandinavian-Defence-James-Plaskett/dp/0713489111

ANDREW BRETT wrote on 02/15/09 at 07:36:18:


If you go by bad grammar and general misuse of the language, you have to nominate several by Chess Stars.  But their books are so good on other, more important criteria that I wouldn't wish to see them listed here.  Further we have to sympathize with people whose knowledge of our language vastly exceeds ours of theirs.

Among native speakers, Gary Lane in particular is one who doesn't seem to have a very good command of English usage, but I wouldn't condemn his books just on account of that.

You know, one thing that severely rankled me is the omission of any credit to Harry Golombek in the editorship of what amounted to a re-release (but in two volumes) of Keres's outstanding, three-volume collection of his own games.  John Nunn supplied minor corrections to Kere's analyses and was given full credit for editorship.  Not a worthy decision by whoever made it.

Come to think of it, I think John Nunn's book on rook and pawn endings is my nomination for this list.