Max Euwe

Jan H. Donner

Cor Van Wijgerden

Het eindspel: Toreneindspelen

At the Crossroads of Chess History On March 24, 1946, the fourth world chess champion, Alexander Alekhine, passed away. He was the first – and still the only – champion to die while holding the title. To select a new champion, a powerful quintuple round-robin was held in The Hague and Moscow. The five strongest players of the era, including one former world champion, two future world champions, and two perennial contenders, took part in a grueling two-month, 25-round tournament. “The match-tournament of 1948 in The Hague and Moscow was one of the most important events in the history of chess. It produced a new world champion, Mikhail Botvinnik, and it was also the start of a new era in which the championship would be regulated by FIDE by means of an intricate system of qualification tournaments that would function with only small changes for decades.” (From the Foreword by Hans Ree) Max Euwe, the fifth world champion, wrote a splendid account of this historic event. It includes a review of all previous encounters between the participants, background information, as well as all the games of the tournament, deeply annotated by Euwe. This fascinating account is finally available in English. You are invited to follow Mikhail Botvinnik, Vassily Smyslov, Sam Reshevsky, Paul Keres and Max Euwe as they battle for the title and the chess world starts its journey through the post-World War II era and the beginning of the Soviet hegemony.

Match/Tournament for the World Chess Championship

The Hague-Moscow 1948

Walter Meiden

Twenty-five chess games chosen, arranged, and annotated to help amateurs learn how to avoid a variety of weak strategic and tactical moves. Selected, with commentary, by World Chess Champion Max Euwe and by Walter Meiden, an amateur player, the games point out graphically how the chess master exploits characteristic errors of the amateur.

Chess Master Vs. Chess Amateur

Damengambit

Damengambit, halb-slawisches Damengambit, unregelmässiges Damengambit, angenommenes Damengambit, Damenbauernspiele (Colle) und anderes

Hans Bouwmeester

Carel Benjamin Van Den Berg

Chess Archives is no longer published but in its day it provided the cutting edge of chess opening theory. It was published monthly by a team of Dutch chess opening analysts, headed by former World Champion Dr. Max Euwe. It was intended to be held in a loose-leaf ring binder. Every month new sheets would arrive. The reader was to insert the new sheets into spaces in the binder according to a coding system. In some cases the old sheets were to be removed and thrown away. Chess Archives was the first publication to introduce a numerical classification of openings. Nowadays, ECO provides the world recognized standard. Chess Archives introduced the system where you had to look at the list and get the Opening Key. For example, the Dragon Sicilian is 14a. If a new opening trick or trap were discovered, one could be sure it would appear soon in Chess Archives. Readers of established books like Modern Chess Openings could have an unpleasant surprise when a line the were playing had been refuted by new discoveries. That was unlikely to happen to any reader of Chess Archives because the new issues would always contain the latest stuff. Bobby Fischer was known to read and devour Chess Archives because he often played new lines that had just appeared in Chess Archives. In one famous game where his opponent had followed Chess Archives, Fischer had found a bust and refuted it in spectacular fashion.

Chess Archives

David Hooper

One of the finest modern works on chess endings. Thorough analysis by former world champion. 331 examples, each with diagram.

A Guide to Chess Endings

Jan Timman

In 1972 Bobby Fischer famously beat Boris Spassky of the Soviet Union in Reykjavik to win the world title. This book tells the classic story of that match, including the perplexing prelude and the dramatic games. This is a NEW EDITION following the death of Bobby Fischer, with a new introductory tribute to Fischer by former world champion Garry Kasparov, and a new preface by Jan Timman, in which he relates of his stunning meeting with Bobby in 1990 in a night club in Brussels.

The Acclaimed Classic About the 1972 Fischer-Spassky Match

Fischer World Champion

Haije Kramer

In chess, the middle game presents the writer as well as the player with the most formidable problems. Its theory is particularly difficult to formulate with the result that it has, as Dr. Euwe explains, received inadequate treatment in chess literature. Indeed, this work was first conceived during the Second World War and has required many years of intensive study by the former World Champion and his collaborator, Mr. H. Kramer, the Dutch international master and chess writer, for its completion. This volume is devoted to what the authors term the 'static features' of the middle game. The character of a position alters with every move. It is therefor the authors' purpose to identify those features of a given position which have more lasting properties and from them to assess its potentialities. After considering the relative value of the pieces, they examine center formations, closed, open and half-open formations, the struggle for open lines, and weak pawns - illustrating their themes with many examples from master play. In a companion volume they will conclude their survey with an investigation of the dynamic and subjective features of the middle game. This comprehensive study of middle-game theory is a classic unlikely to be superseded. It is a valuable addition to the library of every serious student of chess.

Book One, Static Features

The Middle Game in Chess by Euwe

H. Kramer

The Middlegame

The book of Dutch Grandmasters M. Euwe and L. Prins contains a comprehensive analysis of the great Cuban chess player - the third world champion J. R. Capablanca.The authors knew their hero personally, and one of them - Max Euwe - played a match with him and many tournament games. The work about Capablanca with such a volume - almost 200 games, about a quarter of them are analyzed in detail, will be a great value.Without falling under the charm of a Cuban chess player, which would be quite forgivable, the authors give him an objective assessment both in chess and in human terms. This, in my opinion, is especially valuable, as, in many previously published books about the world champion, such an evaluation was somewhat idealized.A separate chapter includes Capablanca's famous "Small Combinations" and examples of his Endgame art. Revealing the myth of the "chess machine" (an epithet that Capablanca was often awarded by his contemporaries). M. Euwe and L. Prince explain the true reasons behind Capablanca's conquest of the chess throne in 1921, his defeat in the 1927 match against Alekhine, and the later tournament successes.The authors pay special attention to his style and to his chess technique that was on a high level. These sections are undoubtedly useful to study for qualified chess players. However, I am sure that all chess enthusiasts will find in the book many interesting and instructive lessons.

The Chess Phenomenon

Jose Raul Capablanca

Gambito de dama

Gambito de dama III

This is essentially a book on chess history, showing how different styles of chess play became popular and flourished and then faded in popularity, such as for example the Hyper-Modern Style of play that became "All the Rage" in the 1920s and 1930s. Former World Chess Champion Dr. Max Euwe traces the history of chess going through the games of the greatest players in history showing how the earliest recorded games show a wild attacking style. Later styles emphasized development, then pawn structure, then defensive play, then positional. Now primarily strategic planning is emphasized.

Max Euwe

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