Going to take on a 2021 project inspired by people posting various albums regularly. Don't know how long I'll make it, but the plan is to post & (briefly) discuss from my collection 1 chess book per day, and 1 magic book and 1 bridge book per week.

Day 1: Mikhail Tal's book on the 1960 world championship match with Botvinnik. I actually have 3 copies (2 different editions) including this autographed one from the collection of the guy who employed me and rented me a room as a 16 & 17 year old chess bum - Ed Labate.

Ed WAS Southern California chess in the 80s and 90s, but that's a story for another day. Tal is one of my favorite #chess players and writers. In this match, he because the youngest world champion in history. His annotations are frank, detailed, and interesting. A couple of

things I particularly like about this book - the recording of the time spent on the moves, so you can track the flow of the human battle and see where the big decisions were being made. Also, an interesting note in one of the games on how different the players' styles were.

Tal wrote of analyzing after one of the games and showing Botvinnik variation after variation and asking his thoughts; Tal was the calculator. He was flabbergasted to find the older, strategic-minded Botvinnik didn't calculate many of the variations Tal was concerned with -

Instead, he would say things like (not a direct quote here), "Yes, I was initially worried about that move, but then I found the correct plan - I had to exchange the dark squared bishops and one pair of rooks." Tal couldn't believe that a player of Botvinnik's caliber would

analyze in such general terms, but as he reviewed the variations he had calculated in very linear ("I go here, he goes here," etc.) terms, he realized that Botvinnik was right - the tactical variations justified Botvinnik's strategic impressions. He realized maybe for the first

time - as I did reading this book as a young, improving player - just how disparate the many roads that lead to Rome can be. (end)