Reinfeld

Fred Reinfeld authored a monthly column for "Chess Review" called "Reader's Games," in which he analyzed games sent in by readers.   Below is a KGA form his Oct. 1942 column that Reinfeld called "a bright little game, with a charming finish."

Reinfeld was quite an interesting player before he turned to writing. In his short career (1926-1942, during which he played 121 games that survived to appear on chessgames.com), he beat Reshevsky twice, Fine twice, and Marshall twice. He also drew his only game against then world champion Alekhine.

 I wonder if anyone on this site is familiar with any of his writings? According to chess games.com, he wrote instructional books that appealed to the novice. Some of his books might  be helpful to the beginners here who ask for advice on what they should read to improve their game.

OldPatzerMike

I have read more than a few Reinfeld books and still own The Complete Chess Course, given to me in 1971.  There are a lot of people who like him (myself included) and others who think he was the biggest hack to ever write chess books.  I have always thought that the detractors didn't like his approach to the brilliant side of the game, as opposed to the technical side.  To each their own.   I really enjoyed his writing/game selection--he would lean more toward Marshall than Capablanca, even though he loved Capa.  I was a beginner when I first read him, and my game improved a lot after reading his books.

batgirl

This had me laughing--it looks like one of your blitz games.  Seems like ol' Fred would have liked your style and would have put a few of your games into book 3 of TCCC.  Thanks for the post!

I read a great little tactics book of his, many examples from it show up on the tactics trainer from time to time. 

Also, that was a bright little King's Gambit, with a cool finish!

Reinfeld has always gotten a lot of stick, but man I have a book by him and Irving Chernev called "Winning Chess" that is just about tactics, and the way the material is organized and presented is just fantastic. It's one of my favorite chess books. 

There is another one people here on the forums mention called "1001 checkmates" I think, and it is supposed to be pretty good too.

And yeah, Fred Reinfeld plus two chessboards side by side was how I first studied the game as a kid in the 70s. None of this fancy-schmancy computering.

Here is what Arnold Denker had to say about Fred Reinfeld:

     Now, among masters who used chess for the apolitical purpose of validating themselves as human beings, there were two main groups—the killers and the intellectuals. For the killers, the only important thing was to win, and that end always justified the means. For the intellectuals, winning was important but so were the purity and beauty of their creations.

     High among the intellectuals was a short, pudgy, bespectacled and very private young man, who had one of the zaniest senses of humor—tellingly tinged with acid—that anyone could imagine. His name: Fred Reinfeld. His accomplishment: he sold more books
about chess than any other author in Caissa's long history.

I call Fred the man of a hundred books because that is about the number he wrote. Books mainly on chess but also 14 volumes on coin collecting and another five on popular science. No one will ever know the exact number of books that he penned, since he ghosted numerous works credited to others. Frank Marshall's 'My Fift Years of Chess' was written by Fred (in three weeks for $1) , and Samuel Reshevsky's classic work, 'Reshevsky on Chess,' also came from this intellectual's typewriter.

     Already I can hear the groans. Reinfeld, an intellectual? The man who wrote more potboilers than the Sicilian has sacrifices? If one means by "intellectual" the likes of Sidney Hook and Lione1 Trilling or Mary McCarthy and Hannah Arendt, then Fred falls into the pseudo category, along with all the rest of us. If one associates the word with less lofty company, then he certainly was an intellectual who, by the way, wrote simple, flowing and occasionally elegant prose. His book, They Almost Made It, a volume devoted to inventors who were foreruners of the giants to whom history gives credit, is a fine work; and his The Great Dissenters, which won then Thomas Ala Edison Foundation Award of 1959, is a distinguished book.

     Physically, Fred was not much of a looker, growing bald early in life. But mentally, he had it all. A man who researched and wrote a many as 13 books a year, Fred was a walking EGO where the openings were concerned and could recite entire tournament books from memory. I remember preparing an opening variation based on one of Jose Capablanca's games from San Sebastian 1911. Without batting an eye, Fred recited the opening moves of that game and announced the result. He did the same thing with the great German
classics, which he knew by heart. Every time I tossed out lines from Goethe, Schiller et alia, Fred finished them effortlessly. He also spoke several other languages.

The Two Mr. Reinfelds

Conventional wisdom holds that there were two Mr. Reinfelds—an early Good Reinfeld who wrote works such as Colle's 'Chess Masterpieces' and Keres' 'Best Games of Chess,' not to mention fine tournament books of Cambridge Springs 1904 and Warsaw 1935, or the lovely interpretive efforts, 'The Unknown Alekhine' and 'Nimzovich the Hypermdern' and a later 'Bad' Reinfeld who gave us 'Chess in a Nutshell' and other acorns.

     The conventional wisdom gets it partly right. But in defense of the Bad Reinfeld, many of his later works for beginners, while certainly annoying to "serious" chess players, served well their targeted audience. His '1001 Brilliant Ways to Checkmate' and '1001 Brilliant Chess Sacrifices and Combinations' are still two of the best books
around for sharpening tactics.

     In 'Nimzovich the Hypermodern' we see Fred at his best and at his worst. He simultaneously provides elegantly written, profound insights and potted history. 'Le Style est l'homme meme,' he quotes Georges Buffon; 'Some minds are stronger and apter to mark the differences of things, others to mark their resemblances,' he quotes Francis Bacon from 'Novum Organum'; and so on. Nice stuff. But in the same book, he writes that Frank Marshall enjoyed 'an excellent life-time score in his games with Nimzovich' (the latter had a plus score); that Akiba Rubinstein 'almost invariably' lost to Nimzovich (Rubinstein had a plus score) ; and that Efim Bogolyubov lacked 'the necessary self-control' to push pawns against Nimzovich and his 'system' (Bogo enjoyed a large plus score).

     Do not, then, read Fred's chess books for precision history. But he did take the time to select good games for his collections, to place these games and their strategical ideas in excitingly drawn contexts, and to produce or reproduce analysis that has worn remarkably well. When Paul Keres wrote that his games were 'beautifully annotated by Mr. Reinfeld,' he was correct rather than generous to say so— just as Max Euwe was properly, not effusively grateful for Fred's fine translation of his 'From My Games, 1920-1937'.

Master Behind the Author

     That Fred produced accurate and deep analysis should surprise no one who played him over-the-board. His chess was precise, positional and poisonous. In the 1933 New York State Championship, he scored 9112-1% to top a field that included the likes of Reuben Fine, Tony Santasiere, David Polland and yours truly. During the 1930s he was the single American player who posted a plus score against Sammy Reshevsky, defeating him twice and drawing him thrice in five games. Fred attributed his success against Sammy to an easygoing, fatalistic attitude. "Unlike Fine," he wrote, 'I was not his rival. Hence my first feeling in playing Sammy was one of relief rather than fear. It was no disgrace to lose to this great master-that could happen to anyone. I had nothing to lose; I had shed my responsibilities; I was carefree as one rarely is in tournament chess.'

     By the late 1930s, Fred had become an expert squeezer, seldom losing a game and seldom winning one. He scored +1 -2 =13 in the 1940 U.S. Championship, a kind of result virtually unknown back then. But on days when he felt primed for a fight, he played some of the most exciting chess of the late 1930s and early 1940s. [One of his games] from Ventnor City received a special prize as 'the showpiece of the tournament.'

     The following year, in the preliminaries of the 1940 U.S. Championship, the same opponents with the same colors and with the same result performed a remarkable encore to the current game. Reinfeld saved himself with another problem-like move that was played to the same square (KN), though on his 39th turn rather than 41st.

An Entertaining Introvert

     Getting close to Fred was far from easy. Sensitive people, who strugge against shyness in their youth, often become remote a adults. Fred was like that. But those of us who came to know him discovered a humorous and entertaining introvert. Fred had that rare facility to see humor in almost everything; and when he laughed, he roared so hard that you lost control with him.

     There was, however, another side. Like many chess masters, Fred could turn mean and biting when encountering minor-league tyrants who so often perpetrate injustices in our little world of chess. When dealing with these antagonists in person, he would cock one eye in apparent disbelief, toss his head from side to side and issue a clucking sound. This routine never failed to cut 'em down to size.

     As for disputes in print, Fred could be astonishingly vitriolic and often, for all of his pen puissance, ineffective. I remember Fred's quarrel with Robert Lewis Taylor, a writer for The New Yorker who published a piece on the 1940 U.S. Championship. Fred described Taylor's style as 'compounded of breathless inanities smothered in pixillated whimsy' and noted that The New Yorker described Taylor 'with unnecessarily brutal frankness' as 'A Reporter at Large.'
Nasty stuff.

     On May 29, 1964, Fred Reinfeld died. He was only 54 years old, but during his short span on earth, he greatly enriched the world of chess by writing three or four great books and numerous good ones.

As for his much-despised potboilers, he usually boiled an honest pot as Dorothy Sayers once said of Charles Williams, and he enlarged the market for serious chess literature by introducing the game to millions of Americans. Some of today's chess writers who attack Fred would be unable to ear a living had the object of their scorn not paved the way.

And that, let me tell you, is a savage irony.

 Here is List-master Bill Wall's article on Reinfeld--------> https://www.chess.com/article/view/fred-reinfeld

I went thru one of his books years ago when I was a beginner, it was a big help.

In my opinion... both.

He was a hack writer, but at the novice level of play (I was then around 1400 strength), I got a great deal out of his books, and owe much of my early progress to his writing.

Great post. Thank you Batgirl. Maybe I should give his books a try, since I'm a novice.

I don't know if Fred Reinfeld has a headstone, but if he doesn't it should be this:

Just prior to the first round at a tournament in Binghamton, NY, years ago, some lower-rated players were asking the big guns (Jon Tisdall, Tim Taylor, Edgar T. McCormick) what books they should read, and Tisdall quipped, "When you reach 1900, it's time to re-read Chess In A Nutshell."  That pretty much ended the conversation.

Ziggy

I had a good laugh at that; thanks!

What is that book? What is funny? Can you explain this to me?

Something like he suggested a book known to be bad so that they would stop asking him questions?

Chess In A Nutshell is a book for those who know nothing about the game; it's like saying once you reach a certain level of proficiency, it's time to review the absolute basics.  The comment to Ziggy was for Reinfeld's ideas on development; Knights should go here, Bishops here, Rooks here, etc. OK?

I am so thankful to Fred Reinfeld, some of his books help me get to expert level, especially his tactics books and I love his books on the three masters he wrote about and their game collection, Nimzovitch, Capablanca and Tarrasch, and wonderful annotation.

One book of his that I wore out was written with Irving Chernev called Chess Strategy and Tactics.  That book introduced me to players like Pillsbury, Noteboom, Przepiorka, etc.  I can't say how much I learned from it, but it was fun going through those games.

Before chess databases, people craved game collections. Game collections came in many forms, such a a player's best games or even a tournament book.  A rather nice collection of games was amassed by Reinfeld in a book called, "Great Brilliancy Prize Games of the Chess Masters" which was published by Collier in 1961.

The game selections and annotations were great... the side notes, maybe less so.

This book opens with a game between Emmanuel Schiffers and Max Harmonist.  Schiffers makes some lovely moves and Harmonist finds himself on the wrong side of a Brilliancy Prize.

Odd;y, Reinfeld prefaces the game:

"The Annals of Chess are shrewn with the names of second-rate players who created a first-class brilliancy.  Here is one such."

If one is unfamilar with either of these players, see:
Max Harmonist
Emmanuel Schiffers

Schiffers, who taught Tschigorin, was anything but a second-rate player in his day and no stranger to brilliant play. 

    According the "British Chess Magazine," Nov. 1888 (p.444):

Germany.—The prize of £5 5s. offered by Mr. F. H. Lewis of London, for the prettiest game in the last Frankfort Congress, has been awarded to M. Schiffers of St. Petersburg, for his game with Herr Harmonist. This is rather a late decision, as the Frankfort tourney was held in July, 1885.