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WORLD CHESS CHAMPIONSHIP 2021 – JBV CHESS BOOKS
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JAN 19, 2022DAVIDE NASTASIOBOOK REVIEWIAN NEPOMNIACHTCHI, JBV CHESS BOOKS, JERZY KONIKOWSKI, KARSTEN MUELLER, MAGNUS CARLSEN, UWE BEKEMANN, WORLD CHESS CHAMPIONSHIP 2021
In today’s world where everything can be seen over the internet, do we still need books?
Especially a book about a world championship in which we saw the challenger, who many thought could win and bring back the title to Russia, crumble in just 11 games?
The answer is a resounding yes. This book gives many different perspectives. For example while watching the games, I realized the depth of Carlsen’s preparation. The annotators showed how some lines happened in the past in other Carlsen’s games. Magnus had to know them, and eventually have worked on them with improvements. Definitely a lot of work!
This book also shows how chess is a sport. Carlsen domination is something unheard of. For example at this point if mastodontic and slow institutions like FIDE (or for US the USCF) would acknowledge we are in a different era, an entertainment age (Netflix with the Queen’s Gambit series has shown how to get over 60 million people interested in chess over night!), they could create different formats for the world championship, and keep everyone interested. They would also receive money from sponsors in amounts they never had before, and of course bring more general public into our beloved sport!
Luckily for us: “for profit” chess sites and “non profit” chess sites are in fact bringing more laymen to play chess. In fact one of the latest online tournaments I followed on Lichess, and was only for players above a rating of 2000, had something like 96000 games played in the couple of hours it was running.
Coming to review the book, in about 160 plus pages, there are five chapters, which quite well describe what one should know about this world championship and the two players.
The book itself can entertain when replaying the games over the board, or improve our chess thanks to a chapter dedicated to positions coming from the games of these two great players.
