There’s a hot new writer of chess books these days – although he gets no royalties and no credit on the title page.
It is Fritz, the German computer program – and the virtual co-author of dozens of books.
No human author wants to risk his analysis being exposed as faulty by a reader with a PC, so manuscripts are routinely vetted by Fritz and other programs.
Even the second volume of Garry Kasparov’s “My Great Predecessors” (Everyman, $35) gets the Fritz treatment.
Kasparov often gives the computer credit for surprising discoveries in much-analyzed sacrifices of Mikhail Tal and positional crushes of Yefim Geller.
Nevertheless, the second “Predecessors” is better than the first because Kasparov had personal contact with three of the new book’s main topics, Tal, Mikhail Botvinnik and Vasily Smyslov.
He describes, for example, the iron views and near-paranoia of his mentor, Botvinnik, who suspected even a close friend of being willing to betray his adjournment analysis.
There’s also fuel for conspiracy theorists.
Kasparov retells the story of how Soviet border police confiscated the secret opening notebooks of former world champion Max Euwe when the 1948 world championship tournament was shifted from the Hague to Moscow.
But he adds a new detail: Copies of the notebooks were made and “somehow” they ended up in the hands of the Soviet players.