Instructive Modern Chess Masterpieces

Book excerpt: 62 brilliant games involving the best players in the world, with notes by one of the top annotators. Igor Stohl has selected 62 outstanding games from recent years and analysed them in painstaking depth. Here he presents his findings to chess enthusiasts, who will find the games entertaining and the annotations both instructive and illuminating. Stohl is an outstanding theoretical expert, so the opening phase of each game reads like a lesson in the key strategic aspects of the opening chosen, with a critical survey of modern trends. The middlegame is dissected and the critical decisions subjected to keen scrutiny - we are invited inside Stohl's laboratory to join him in the quest for the truth. The endgame phase, if reached, is handled with similar erudition, with insights into the grandmaster's approach to questions of technique. Following each game there is a discussion of the most important lessons to be learned. The expanded and revised new edition of this award-winning work features 12 new top-level games from the period 2000-2007 annotated in great depth - about 40% new material. There are also corrections to the existing notes and a revised Introduction.