Paul Keres (1916–1975)

There are brief introductions in Estonian, English, Spanish and German by Keres' widow Maria, Fridrik Olafsson and the compiler Hendrik Olde, fifty odd photographs (some of which are related to Keres tangentally at best: one shows the game Fischer-Olafsson, Zurich 1961; Keres played in the same tournament, but there the connection seems to end), ten games with brief languageless annotations by Keres (there are !s and ?s but nothing else, not even evaluation symbols), indices by opponent, opening and tournament, and a list of Keres' results. The rest is four hundred pages or so of almost two thousand bare game scores in figurine algebraic notation with the occasional diagram. Crosstables are provided for some tournaments, but most are lacking. Strangely, none of Keres' many correspondence games seem to be included (Tim Harding's correspondence database has over a hundred of them).

The games themselves are, of course, frequently wonderful, but the scores for most of them are available freely on the web, and there is little else to draw in the casual fan. Quite possibly the book is essential for chess historians (some of the games may not be available elsewhere, and I know of at least one given with an erroneous score in the Chessbase Megabase, but correctly in this volume), but it's very hard to get excited about it.… (mais)