In London, in the spring of 1895, world champion Emanuel Lasker gave a series of lectures, geared to the level of club players. Later that year Lasker expanded and gathered the material and published it as a book.
Common Sense in Chess has remained an instructional classic ever since. Our friends at Russell Enterprises in Connecticut have just published a splendid new edition of this book. This characteristics of this edition are:
- it is converted to the algebraic notation
- many diagrams have been added
- the text has been reformatted to make it more clear
- two chapters are added with Lasker's annotations of Hastings' 1895 last round games.
Common Sense in Chess is a masterpiece of compression and exposition. Lasker treated everything a club player should know: basic opening theory, middle game strategy and tactics, and endgame fundamentals.
The chapters on attack and defence reveal Lasker's ability to condense matters to a single underlying principle: obstructions. It is the attacker's business to remove them, and the defender's to create them. Can chess really be that simple? In Lasker's hands yes.
Please have a look at this very affordable (only ?¢‚Äö¬¨17.95) edition of
this book that has lost nothing of its freshness.