03 February 2011

Fischer's Best Games?

The book 'ENDGAME' by Frank Brady (Crown Publishers, 2011) has finally hit the stores and judging by the number of reviews, it will be one of the greatest successes in the history of chess publishing. I've certainly managed to get considerable mileage from the book, using it as the basis for seven posts across my three blogs, with this current post to be added to the list.

If you're curious what the rest of the blogosphere, not to mention the entire online world, is saying about 'ENDGAME', the blog Jim West On Chess has been keeping tabs on the activity for both Brady's book and the new documentary 'Bobby Fischer Against the World'. It's hard to believe that having a Fischer book and a Fischer film released at the same time was a coincidence, but considering that January was three years to the month since Fischer died, maybe that's the time it takes to have a substantial work emerge from the primordial ooze of the creative process.

My last contribution to the surge of interest was to assemble a new file containing the game scores from both versions of Brady's first book on Fischer: 'Profile of a Prodigy' (PGN). The first version (David McKay Company, 1965) is based on the file found on Gambit Chess - DB Books, containing 75 games. The second version (Dover Publications, 1989) is a new file containing 90 games, of which the first 43 were also published in the 1965 version. The two game collections represent one expert's subjective choice of Fischer's all time best games and deserve to be promoted.

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