Sunday, December 18, 2016

Book Review of Bobby Fischer's "Checkmate"

From late 1966 through early 1970, Bobby Fischer wrote Checkmate, a monthly chess column for Boys' Life magazine.  These columns have been gathered together in Checkmate: Bobby Fischer's Boys' Life Columns [Russell Enterprises Inc., 2016, 128 pages] with a foreword by GM Andy Soltis.

If you own a copy of My 60 Memorable Games, you will probably want to add Checkmate to your book collection because there are a couple of Fischer's games with analysis by him not to be found elsewhere.

The games are Fischer-Myagmarsuren from the 1967 interzonal and Nikolic-Fischer from Vinkovci in 1968.  Both games feature piece sacrifices by Fischer from King's Indian formations.  Apparently Fischer's novelty 13.a3 against Myagmarsuren was found at the board because he spent 15 minutes on it!

I also learned from Soltis's foreword that GM Larry Evans claimed he was entitled to 40% of the royalties from My 60 Memorable Games, hinting that his contribution to the book was considerable.