Over the past few years the great chess player Garry Kasparov has written five
best-selling books praising the contributions to chess made by the previous
world champions. The series is called ''My Great Predecessors''. As a reaction to
this wonderful series of books, leading chess writer Tibor Károlyi has written this
imaginary sixth volume. In gently humorous – but chessically serious – style, the
author imagines Kasparov is annotating over 70 of his own lost games, and
blaming all these defeats on the bad influence of each of the previous world
champions, providing in-depth analysis to show how he was misled by them.
The book also serves as a highly instructive, practical chess book – to beat
Kasparov, the greatest player of all time, took some pretty special chess, and
readers will enjoy learning from this. It is astonishing how the author has
managed to find so many games that exhibit uncanny similarities between
Kasparov and his predecessors, which makes the content of the book extremely
plausible – as if Kasparov himself were writing it. This is a brilliant and totally
original chess book that could only have been written by someone with great
knowledge of Kasparov and the past world champions.
