Modern Chess Analysis (Correspondence Chess Champions) - Softcover

Inhaltsangabe

A Gambit Classic Reissue: Techniques that have revolutionized chess analysis

"Despite being a chess professional who uses chess software almost every day to analyse and prepare for games, I learned numerous new techniques from Smith's book." - GM Ian Rogers

Chess analysis is nearly as old as the game itself, with many of the pioneering works by the giants of chess history being devoted to the analysis of positions, openings and endings. Chess analysis, theory, and knowledge advanced with each subsequent analyst building upon the knowledge of those who went before, using methods that had changed little since those earlier times.

That is until now.

“Computers are incredibly fast, accurate and stupid; humans are incredibly slow, inaccurate and brilliant; together they are powerful beyond imagination.” - attributed to Albert Einstein

Personal computers and powerful chess software are having a profound effect on chess analysis and theory. Today it is hard to find a grandmaster who does not use a computer, and yet this is the first book devoted to combining the computer and the human brain for chess analysis - an endeavour that is central to modern chess.

However, this book does far more than explain methods for computer-assisted analysis. Readers will develop a deeper understanding of the strengths and limitations of the human mind, and a greater understanding of many areas of chess while working through the examples that Robin Smith presents.

The many topics in this wide-ranging book include:

• Schematic thinking
• Dynamic play vs quiet manoeuvring
• Fortresses
• King Hunts and ‘King Drift’
• The Problem of Exchanging
• Interactive Analysis

Robin Smith is a top-class correspondence chess player. He has been USA Correspondence Chess Champion on two occasions and has won a World Correspondence Chess Championship semi-final.

"if used properly [computers] can be a very useful aid to analysis. However, there is more to it than just setting up the position and asking the computer to analyse it, for there are some types of position in which the computer excels, and others in which it simply flounders. Basically, the computer works best in tandem with the human player, not independently of him/her. ... There is no doubt that the author really understands the strengths and weaknesses of the silicon monster, and the book contains lots of useful tips and advice. Whether we like it or not, computers are very much part of chess as they are of all other aspects of our lives, and he who is in the position to make best use of them will inevitably prosper." - Alan Sutton, En Passant

"a remarkable guide to using chess software to optimum effect. ... within a few pages I was hooked. ... Smith is a correspondence player who has apparently endless time to test examples on all the major chess programs and by astute use of these programs he convincingly unravels some positions which had been assumed to be invulnerable to computer analysis. Keen to discover whether Smith's insights were new or would be common knowledge to the computer programming community, I passed the book on to an artificial intelligence expert, Rodney Topor from Brisbane's Griffith University. Fortunately Topor was also impressed, commenting, 'Smith's descriptions of chess programs are very accurate and I was interested to learn how much difference there is between them.'" - GM Ian Rogers, Canberra Times

"What struck me immediately was the elegance and clarity of Mr. Smith's writing style. Quite aside from his ground-breaking analysis of the interface between game of chess, the human brain and computers, the book is a pleasure to read." - H. Johnson (Amazon reviewer)

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