Review: How to Crush Your Chess Opponents

There are generally two schools of chess annotation – the Informant-style, essentially language-free, symbol-based annotations full of variations, and then there’s the wordy type that presents the critical ideas and options during a game, as well as whatever variations the annotator deems relevant. Both have their place, but most players will surely benefit more from the latter, particularly if the annotator is a strong player who can clearly convey the most important elements of the game.

In How to Crush Your Chess Opponents, author Simon Williams provides just this type of instructive annotation. The British grandmaster has selected thirty games, many from among the biggest names in chess today. J. Polgar, Topalov, Shirov, Anand, Carlsen, Ivanchuk are just some of the players you’ll encounter.

You can read the rest of the review here for the next week, and then it is permanently archived here.