Worst annotator:
Lakdawala. TOO casual. Much too poetic and expressive, with too many analogies. Grammatical mistakes are sprinkled throughout his books and many of them are just not readable anymore.
Best/worst annotators
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Try this annotator, I am sure you will laugh a lot, at least:
GM Robert Hubner's Twenty-five Annotated Games is a serious book that I congratulate you for mentioning. At over 400 pages for 25 games it is an advanced work that many people would find intimidating. I hope you learn and enjoy it. It hardly got reviewed when it was published in Germany ( in English) and is little known I believe.
Lasker1900 napisał:
Ray Keene published some very good stuff, then he wrote a mass of crap! Cyrus Lakdawala buries some excellentannotation under a tidal wave of horrible prose. If he had any self control, he could be really good
Lasker1900
Can you please list Keene's best books?
Thanks
Aug 19, 2016
0
#6
Aron Nimzovich: A Reappraisal was republished as Aaron Nimzovich: Master of Planning. I agree that it's a modern classic. I don't have access to my copy at the moment, but I don't remember if it's annotations were that good?
The OP gave a very nice list.
Can we add Jan Timman to the list of great annotators? His "Art of Chess Analysis" delves very deeply into a small number of games to get as close to the truth as possible. If he did not start the trend he gave it impetus.
Also Dvoretsky. He aims for the utmost accuracy in the variations he works out in just about all of his books, but "Dvoretsky's Analytical Manual" is the most amazing.
Finally Alfonso Romero's "Creative Chess Strategy" is another vlaiant attempt to find the truth about the games he presents, rather than being satisfied with entertaining platitudes.
People often talk about who the best chess writers are. But I'm wondering who people think are the best chess annotators? And who are the worst?
I would nominate the following as some of the best in no particular order:
Jon Speelman
His best games collection isn't as famous as many, but his notes were clear, detailed, and made the book one of the most instructive chess books I have ever read.
John Nunn
Seems to be clearly related to Speelman. Also clear, detailed, and instructive. I really need to sit down and spend some serious time with his games collections.
Robert Hubner
I'm working my way through his Twenty-Five Annotated Games now. Detail. Lots of variations. Seldom do his notes leave unanswered questions.
Garry Kasparov
I've never been a fan of his. He seems to be very much of a jerk, frankly. And in some cases, it's not clear how much of his work is actually by him. But credit where credit is due. I actually really appreciate his habit of giving long variations. I am not a fan of his Great Predecessors, but I love his three volumes on his rivalry with Karpov and his three volumes of his own best games.
Yasser Seirawan
Readable. Instructive. And just plain fun. He has a casual style that is readable and instructive, but not nearly so heavy on variations. His No Regrets on Fischer-Spassky 1992 is one of my favorite chess books mostly because of the annotations!
Bobby Fischer
Again, not someone I admire as a person. But his 60 memorable games are a pleasure to play through. And the accuracy of the notes has held up incredibly well despite their age and the lack of computer analysis available. His other notes tend to also be of very high quality. He did relatively few annotations, and I wonder if that is because it was just so exhausting to be perfectionist about them.
Mark Taimanov
Lyrical. A good balance of words and variations. A pleasure to play through his notes.
And my nominee for a worst annotator may surprise people.
Aron Nimzowitch.
Apparently he has never heard of plain language. His attempts at sounding grandiose make his notes very difficult to read and to use.
I know people are going to praise Alekhine. But to me, his notes suffer for lack of accuracy--not that they are bad, but they don't hold up as well as, say, Fischer--his tendency to embellish, and their lack of detail compared to other annotators.
Actually, I would say that annotation quality has improved a lot in recent years. I think that's only partly because of computers. The standard of annotation quality has been rising rapidly since at least WW2. So while annotators like Alekhine, Tartakower, and Botvinnik were tops in their days, and are still good now, I don't think they are still really the cream of the crop.