Three Days with Bobby Fischer

& Other Chess Essays

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by GM Lev Alburt

and Al Lawrence

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Three Days with Bobby Fischer and other chess essays is a chess book you can sit back comfortably in your armchair and just read. Or, when you feel like getting the pieces out of the box and learning from some great games, tactics and strategiesthats all here as well.

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Nearly everyone with an interesting chess shares the same two questions:

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What were the great champions like?

How can I choose opening moves that give me a good game?

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Chess Hall-of-Famer and three-time U.S. champion Lev Alburt teams us with World Chess Hall of Fame Executive Director and Chess Journalist of the Year Award winner Al Lawrence to answer these questionsand to tell the intriguing, inspiring and sometimes downright bizarre behind-the-scenes stories of the chess greats and near-greats, and how, above all else, they were men of their times.

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* Steinitz, who codified the rules of good play before

going berserk

* Lasker, the chessboard Freudian who wielded

psychological weapons

* Capablanca, dashingly handsome and to whom

everything came easy

* Alekhine, a dsiplaced person who gave up drink

to win

* Under-rated Euwe, the last amateur to become

world champion

* Botvinnik, who refrained from sex to preserve his

phosphorus

* Smyslov, an amateur opera singer who brought

chess and artist' touch

* Tal, whose gaze and red-hot sacrifices wilted even

the toughest wills

* Petrosian, who through chess became a paradox--a

Soviet bourgeois

* Spassky, irreverent attacker who bowed to

enigmatic Bobby Fischer

* Karpov, the positional boa constrictor of the board

* Kasparov, the charismatic boxer-chess-player who's

still at the top.

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And many more great players of the past and present who never made it to the very top, but nevertheless left their indelible mark on the game.

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288 pages, paperback, many full-color and black-and-white photos, 120-plus diagrams