Book review (updated): FIVE works on Magnus Carlsen
This is a review by FM James Vigus of recent books on Magnus CarlsenReview (updated March 2022):
Magnus Carlsen: A Life in Pictures (New in Chess, 2021), 160 pages
The Magnus Method by Emmanuel Neiman (New in Chess, 2021), 320 pages
Magnus Carlsen’s Most Instructive Games by Martyn Kravtsiv (Gambit, 2021), 175 pages
Magnus Carlsen: 60 Memorable Games by Andrew Soltis (Batsford, 2020), 374 pages
Magnus Carlsen's Middlegame Evolution by Ivan Sokolov (Quality Chess, 2021), 277 pages
Just over a year ago I reviewed Zenon Franco’s pair of test-yourself books on Carlsen's games for CHESS Monthly. Here I take a look at a few other recent offerings. Since these books were published, Magnus Carlsen has yet again triumphantly defended his world title.
The lavish hardback produced by the New in Chess team, Magnus Carlsen: A Life in Pictures (sample pages in pdf), admittedly won’t improve your chess. It consists almost entirely of photographs of the champion, grouped into chapters, each with a short introduction about a particular era in his life. This unusual work is a fitting souvenir of a stellar chess career. Childhood and family photos, some of them quite touching, gradually give way to a series of both public and private moments at the chessboard. We see Carlsen confronting his rivals at the board, very focused - or occasionally distracted or bored-looking. We also see him training with Kasparov, who is equipped with a laptop and has a very purposeful demeanour - a dictaphone placed on the table in order, one supposes, to catch all the older player’s pearls of wisdom. There are various photos of Carlsen playing sport. There is also a section on his brief period as a fashion model. It would be difficult to claim that these photos reveal anything unexpected about Magnus’s character. Not surprisingly, though, they consistently radiate a sense of energy. An outdoor picture in a yogi pose reminds us of Carlsen’s commitment to physical fitness as well as mental balance, two of the qualities that have seen him through his fifth world title match. This is of course a purely celebratory book: we can't expect to find expressions of disappointment or frustration here. Moments of humour are visible, though, and some expressions that you would only notice in this form.
The Magnus Method is subtitled: The Singular Skills of the World’s Strongest Chess Player Uncovered and Explained. The French FM Emmanuel Neiman has a good past record of instructional books, having written the prizewinning Invisible Chess Moves (with Yochanan Afek, 2011) and Tune Your Chess Tactics Antenna (2013), likewise with New in Chess. The introduction seeks to define some of the features that make Carlsen’s talent so special. Neiman summarises Carlsen’s ‘strong points’ within the very reasonable categories of objective evaluation of positions; chess knowledge; versatility; fighting spirit; pragmatism and perfectionism (both of these, in the right measures); and ‘intelligence/psychology’.
Chapter 1 takes this further by tracing stylistic features of the champion’s play, and chapter 2 more briefly notes Carlsen’s achievement in reducing the importance of the search for big-hitting opening novelties. There follow ten chapters of quiz positions grouped by theme, such as attack, defence, tactics, exchanges, endings, and so on. Chapter 10: ‘Pieces: the art of going backwards’ contains some beautifully-observed material. On p. 122 the meat of the book begins: a collection of 248 annotated games, many of which are fragments rather than full encounters. The diagrams in these games are repeated from the earlier chapters. This means that readers have a choice of self-testing methods. We can either tackle the individual, themed diagrams and flip forward in the book for the solutions; or we play through whole games and stop to think at each diagram. (Of course it’s possible to skip the self-testing altogether and simply play through the games.) I found the experience of flipping forward rather awkward and bitty, so I gave up on the ten chapters of diagrams and embarked on the second method of reading instead. I also found that the tasks varied a great deal, from concrete tactics to a relatively general level of planning. Whilst there is much to be said for this - in a real game we never know when it’s ‘White to play and win’ - it is again a relatively demanding format for the reader.
There is some useful and thought-provoking material in this book. My feeling, though, is that it could have benefited from more editing. For example, there are some unfocused pages in chapter 1 in which the author compares Carlsen fleetingly with a long list of other great players. True, Carlsen probably combines the strengths of almost of all them, but I struggled to keep hold of the thread here. For comparison, Zenon Franco’s brief comparison of Carlsen’s pragmatism with that of Lasker (in Magnus Wins With White) makes a more convincing impression.
Nevertheless, readers willing to work hard will enjoy this book. In general, the annotations are light but effective. Neiman has a good eye for patterns, such as when he groups together games in which Carlsen performs a rook-lift along the third rank. Sometimes Neiman provides fragments of games by other players, which can make nice points of comparison. I also liked the fact that samples from Carlsen's whole career appear, including from his earliest junior years: Neiman points out some of the ways in which his approach to chess has evolved. Neiman has kept a close eye on Carlsen's interviews and post-mortems and quotes from them judiciously. Finally, the set of positions in which the reader is invited to find the win against Carlsen is a nice touch. This is a good book, which with smoother organisation could have been an excellent one.
Magnus Carlsen’s Most Instructive Games has a broadly similar goal to Neiman's book: teaching practical lessons via Carlsen's games. That said, its approach and its strengths are very different.
This time we have 42 complete games, thoroughly annotated, without a test-yourself feature. Kravtsiv stresses that it is a collection of Carlsen's most instructive games rather than his 'best' ones.
Four games illustrate opening themes, starting with a lead in development and exploiting a king stuck in the centre. Then the bulk of the book addresses middlegame topics - attack, defence, counterplay, positional chess. A handful of games demonstrate endgame play (Carlsen's endgames being the topic of a whole book by Tibor Karolyi in 2018), and the last three games are grouped under the heading 'human factors, relating to various aspects of psychology.
This is a tightly-organised book, written in a clear style. Kravtsiv’s sober explanations focus on extracting helpful lessons. There is nothing especially new or surprising in the themes or tips. Unlike Neiman, who includes a bibliography and sometimes cites others' analyses, Kravtsiv rarely mentions any sources, presumably aiming to keep the presentation as clean as possible. He does, unsurprisingly, give computer analysis, which nowadays makes me wonder: which engine(s)? Can we assume that a professional analyst in 2021 will be using a combination of Stockfish and Leela? I'd be interested to know. Again, though, the approach is minimalist rather than discursive: here is the best line.
A book like this depends entirely on the strength of its annotations. With so many videos, blogs and magazine articles analysing Carlsen's victories available, it is reasonable to wonder how much one needs a collection like this. I tried a couple of spot-check comparisons. Game 2, Carlsen-Grandelius, Stavanger 2016, features the world champion's sacrificial demolition of Black's unorthodox opening, 1 e4 c5 2 Nf3 Nf6!? I found four sets of annotations. Daniel King's Daniel King's Powerplay video on YouTube struck me as generally the most incisive. King, for instance, highlights the importance of the move 8 Bc4 (after 3 e5 Nd5 4 Nc3 Nxc3 5 dxc3 Nc6 6 Bf4 Qb6 7 Qc1 f6), which Kravtsiv passes over in silence. Neiman, too, has a comment on the sacrificial move 8 Bc4, but it mostly consists of a rambling comparison between Carlsen and other champions. But King overlooks Black’s saving move (after the further 8...g5 9 Bg3 g4 10 exf6 gxf3 11 Qf4 fxg2 12 Rg1), 12...h5!, which Kravtsiv analyses in detail. The fourth commentary is that of Peter Heine Nielsen in New in Chess Magazine. There are relatively few major divergences between Nielsen’s comments and those of Kravtsiv. In the case of an author as conscientious as Kravtsiv, this is not evidence of copying. Rather this game is so concrete that two sets of engine-powered grandmaster analysis are unlikely to reach very different conclusions.
Elsewhere Kravtsiv certainly makes good his claim in the Introduction: ‘Several of the games in this book have been published in chess magazines or annotated online, but I have analysed them much more deeply and with a different focus, so you will discover many new points even if you have seen them before’. For example, the notes to Kariakin-Carlsen, Shamkir 2019, thoroughly surpass those of Nielsen in New in Chess Magazine.
Although Kravtsiv’s notes are always cogent, I was occasionally unsure of the rationale of some of his opening analysis. Take game 1, Vaibhav-Carlsen, Internet rapid 2018, which opened 1 e4 d5 2 exd5 Nf6 3 d4 Bg4 4 f3 Bf5 5 c4. Here Kravtsiv comments that ‘5 Bb5+ is probably a better move’, analysing it to a slight advantage for White. But if this is worth mentioning, why not also 5 g4 Bg6 6 c4, the fearsome ‘correspondence refutation’ (as it is dubbed in David Smerdon’s book on the Scandinavian)? Not everything can be covered of course, but why just the one line and not the other?
These, however, are minor quibbles about a book that I enjoyed increasingly the more time I spent with it, and warmly recommend.Kravtsiv's book is introduced on YouTube by John Nunn here.
In Magnus Carlsen: 60 Memorable Games (Batsford Chess 2020), the American grandmaster Andrew Soltis has produced a book that visually resembles Bobby Fischer's classic My 60 Memorable Games. As in Fischer's work, each game bears a title and is introduced by a paragraph providing an anecdote or interesting information.
The games cover Carlsen's whole career up to the time of publication, beginning in 2003 and ending in 2020. The layout is easy on the eye. The columns and careful placement of the diagrams lend themselves to self-testing, should readers so wish.
An engaging introduction picks out some of the defining characteristics of Magnus's genius. The qualities Soltis identifies, with a selection of memorable examples, include the ability to assess which positions are easier to play than others; stylistic universality; superb memory; and stamina.
Soltis picks a broad stylistic range of games. In so doing, he suggests how Carlsen's skills - already impressive in 2003 - gradually developed. For example, having shown an early game featuring an attack with opposite-coloured bishops, Soltis points out where this theme re-emerges later.
Soltis's annotations are clear, accessible and methodical. Readers of, say, IM level and above may wish for more analytical detail in places, and can find it in other books on Carlsen. But most readers will learn a lot from Soltis's approach and enjoy doing so.
What I particularly like about Soltis's notes is the frequent presentation of a train of thought. Rather than simply state what is best play according to computer analysis, Soltis guides us through a strong player's mental process step-by-step, for example:
With this kind of elucidation, Soltis makes it possible to grasp in a logical way what might at first seem impossible high-level games.
Carlsen has played so many interesting games that there is very little overlap between this book and the other Carlsen collections reviewed here. For less experienced players, Soltis's work is probably the best introduction to the world champion's magical play.
Finally, my review of Magnus Carlsen's Middlegame Evolution by Ivan Sokolov appears in the March 2022 issue of CHESS Monthly and can be viewed in this pdf sample (page 54).