Anatoly Karpov’s Best Games

Title: Anatoly Karpov’s Best Games

Author: Anatoly Karpov

Publisher: Batsford

Genre: Game Collection

Level: Advanced intermediate / Advanced

Contents: Anatoly Karpov’s game collection has 43 of the world champion’s games. The games date from 1971 to 1994, all are won by Karpov, in 35 games Karpov plays White, and in the other eight he plays Black. Karpov writes a two page introduction and a short laconic introduction to some of the games.

Who is it good for? The book may be helpful to an advanced player who would like to read a game collection containing only world top players (Karpov, Kasparov, Korchnoi, Anand, Kramnik and so on).

The Good Things:

· Every game in the book is of the highest quality

· There is always an extra something to be gained from analysis of the player who actually played a specific game

The Bad Things:

· Karpov is a giant player but, at best, a mediocre writer. He is dry, arrogant, lacks self-humor and does not share any weaknesses with the reader

· The analysis is lacking in many places (For example in game 30 against M. Gurevich Karpov goes for over 30(!) moves without almost no comment, through extremely complicated positions)

Quote: “For this win in the Alekhine Memorial, I was awarded a prize for ‘playing in Alekhine’s style’. Strictly speaking, I do not feel this was not a very precise decision. In fact, in the work of the forth World Champion there were many examples of the battle being transferred from the queenside to the kingside. But here we were actually dealing with a rarer theme, as on the contrary, I managed to transfer the battle from the kingside to the queenside with a decisive effect! Then this beautiful victory also soon won the best game prize in Informator.”

The Bottom Line: If, like me, you want to have a game collection written by every great player then Karpov is surely on the list. Otherwise this is not the definitive Karpov collection.