Invisible Chess Moves is ChessCafe's Book of the Year

Invisible Chess Moves won the 2011 ChessCafe Book of the Year award. After several weeks of voting, the book by Yochanan Afek and Emmanuel Neiman beat Jeremy Silman's How to Reassess Your Chess and Boris Gulko & Dr Joel R. Sneed's Lessons with a Grandmaster. It was the 12th time that the prize was awarded by chess website ChessCafe.

In the past, big chess authors such as John Nunn and John Watson won the award. Little-known FM Charles Hertan got it for the year 2008, ahead of Lars Bo Hansen and Garry Kasparov. A year later the prize went to Herman Grooten's Chess Strategy for Club Players - The Road to Positional Advantage and last year Yasser Seirawan's Chess Duels won the award for best book of 2010.

Invisible Chess Moves, mentioned in this review by us, has the subitle 'Discover Your Blind Spots and Stop Overlooking Simple Wins'. It is about moves which are harder to see than others.

Why is it that, frequently, uncomplicated wins simply do not enter your mind? Even strong grandmasters suffer from blind spots that obscure some of the best ideas during a game. What is more: often both players fail to see the opportunity that is right in front of their eyes. Neiman and Afek have researched this problem and discovered that there are actually identifiable reasons why your brain discards certain ideas. In this book they demonstrate different categories of hard-to-see chess moves and clearly explain the psychological, positional and geometric factors which cloud the chess player’s brain.

is how the book is described by the publisher.

It was co-written by Yochanan Afek. Everyone reading these lines will know Yochanan from the weekly endgame studies here at ChessVibes - many of them composed by Yochanan himself. The Israeli IM is an active player himself, as well as a trainer and writer. Co-author Emmanuel Neiman is a successful coach in the Paris region and in fact the son of a famous Israeli painter.

The book was first published in France by Payot and later in both English (by New in Chess) and Spanish (Casa del Ajedrez). Afek told us that a Russian publisher has shown strong interest in the manuscript as well.

Congratulations to both authors, and the publisher!