Masters of the Chessboard

"Réti was a very strong player, who died at the age of 40, unfortunately. He once played 29 games simultaneously, blindfolded. He was a tremendous talent. His particular claim to fame is that he was a great theoretician, and invented his own opening, which still bears his name – the Réti opening. He was one of the leaders of a revolutionary philosophical movement in chess, called the hypermodern school. The hypermoderns overturned certain preconceptions which had become, perhaps, too rigidly adhered to, like the view that you had to occupy the centre at all costs. But this book, Masters of the Chessboard, isn’t a polemical work. It’s beautifully written. What Réti does is he looks at all the great chess players of the past, going back to the mid-19th century, up to his own time. He analyses the style of the individual players and explains what they brought to the game. You get a sense of their character and personality, also because he played a lot of these people in his short career. He writes about Capablanca, and has this wonderful line about him: “He speaks his native tongue when he plays chess.” It’s as if he learned to play chess almost before he learned how to speak, and he contrasts Capablanca with another player, one of his challengers, who learned chess at a later age, and describes him as “someone speaking in a foreign language”, which I thought was a most elegant metaphor. He also explains chess in a very scientific way, so he has a chapter devoted to the technique of chess combinations. He does it in a methodical way, which for the student of chess is very valuable. He also has a chapter on rook endings, the most important of all ending types, and he develops ideas on that in a way which you can’t help but learn from. It was first published in 1933, and people have tried to write follow-ups, looking at more recent chess players in the same way. An American master called Anthony Saidy wrote a book called The Battle of Chess Ideas , where he went from Réti’s time to Fischer (whom he knew well). It’s a very good book, but it doesn’t have the kind of didactic or visionary properties that Réti has, so it didn’t make my list. Despite all the improvements that have happened in technique and knowledge, for anyone who really wants to understand chess, Masters of the Chessboard is a book to read just beyond the point of starting out, when you get to a certain level. It explains the nature of positional strategy in chess probably better than anyone else has ever done."