A while ago I played through the games in Irving Chernev's book "Logical Chess: Move By Move". Studying the games in Chernev's book was fun and made me want to read more annotated games. Therefore, I looked around to find another game collection with annotations that are written with beginner-level players in mind. After a little bit of research, I decided to buy "Chess Master vs. Chess Amateur" by Max Euwe and Walter Meiden. Almost all books containing annotated chess games focus on games played by master-level players. I still think that I learnt a lot by studying the games of chess masters using Chernev's book. My own games, however, are decided by mistakes that are far from being subtle. Euwe's book focuses on typical strategic mistakes chess amateurs make. By studying these less than brilliant games, I was hoping to learn to avoid mistakes and to exploit potential weak moves of my opponents.

The book contains 25 heavily annotated games. Each game is played by a chess master (presumably Max Euwe, the chess world champion of 1935-37) and an amateur who inevitably loses the game (no suspense here). The level of play increases towards the end of the book. It should be noted that the "amateurs" featured in the book do not make many tactical mistakes and never make outright blunders. Big blunders happen more often than not in my own games but a game collection is not particularly effective to learn tactics. Consequently, the main focus is on correct development during the opening and middlegame play.

This raises the question who these "amateurs" are and the names of the players are not mentioned in the book. The fact that it is co-authored by Walter Meiden, supposedly a "typical" amateur gives the impression that he is the amateur playing against Euwe. However, the games fit so nicely together to demonstrate various aspects of chess that I came to believe that Euwe might even have "invented" the games himself.

Over all I really enjoyed playing through these games. In addition to the move annotations, each game contains an introduction with a description of the general ideas of the game and the most critical mistakes the amateur makes. I recommend to take a chess board and to play through the games from the master's perspective. I found it particularly instructive to guess the next move and to try to find the reasons behind the moves played. From a beginner's perspective it was sometimes scary to observe how the amateur's position degrades with each move after a single strategic mistake that I wouldn't have noticed on my own.

"Chess Master vs. Chess Amateur" is written in descriptive notation which may cause a headache for some people. However, I think that it is worth to learn descriptive notation - it gives access to many classic chess books that may be old but still well worth reading. At the beginning it will probably be a bit confusing at times if you are used to the more contemporary algebraic notation, but the diagrams included in the book help and reading this notation becomes more natural after playing through a couple of games. A positive side effect of the book's age and the old-fashioned notation is that the reprint edition is relatively cheap. In conclusion, I can recommend it to all chess beginners because it is one of the very few if not the only well annotated game collection where the level of play is within reach of the reader.

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written by Rocky, February 19, 2007

You can go to this site (http://wwwu.uni-klu.ac.at/gossimit/c/book.htm) and download a chessbase file of the pgns in Euwe's book as well as many other books.

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written by Sciurus, February 19, 2007

Thanks for the link! I added it to the links section, too.

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written by dwv16, February 19, 2007

I guess I'll have to get this book to know what you're thinking when we play...

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written by Sciurus, February 20, 2007

Fact is that you won all games I played against you, so stop thinking so much

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written by Atomic Patzer, February 22, 2007

Thanks for this review. Looks like something I could use. I ordered it.

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