The Best of Chess Informant - Garry Kasparov, CD
The Man Behind the Legend:
- Bio, Stats & Facts, Photos, etc.
- The Inventor: Trailblazing Novelties Trendsetting Opening Ideas and Plans
- The Hurricane: Storming initiative, annihilating attacks, devastating counterattacks, mind-boggling combinations & crushing moves, etc.
- The Immortal: Timeless masterpieces annotated by the Man Himself
- For Mortals: Play Like Garry, Test Your Skills, Rare Blunders & Misconceptions
In the introduction to the CD, Kasparov wrote:
We are all Children of the Informant Today, looking down from the crest of the computerized 21st Century, it is possible to fully assess the enormous, genuinely revolutionary role played by the Chess Informant. This periodical, which began publication in Belgrade, 1966, laid the basis for a chess information system. Already in the 70s it, along with the 5-volume Encyclopedia of Chess Openings, became a sort of bible for top-ranked chessplayers the world over. I believe it was no accident that it was precisely Yugoslavia that gave birth to both the Informant and the Encyclopedia, organized according to Rabar’s A-B-C-D-E classification. That country’s team, led by the gifted Svetozar Gligoric, became Olympic Champion in 1950, and won prizes in many Olympiads thereafter. Chess gained unusual popularity in Yugoslavia, and in the latter half of the 20th century, it assumed the role of a genuine chess Mecca: where else could you find so many international tournaments?! Ultimately, the growth of both tournaments and strong players created a need for information about the most important games and opening novelties that gradually ended up fundamentally changing our entire system of preparation. Who could have predicted then that a new epoch was beginning in chess? Did Tigran Petrosian, sarcastically referring to the younger generation as “the Informants’ children,” realize that there was no longer any way back. Only forward – to computer databases and programs, to the Internet epoch, when the shelf-life of a novelty would be measured no longer in months, but literally in hours… My chess youth and mature years came just at the period of the Chess Informant’s peak popularity. I remember how, in 1973, with beating heart, I opened my first “fount of all wisdom” – Volume 15. And how later, having learned from my teachers (and especially from Mikhail Botvinnik) how to analyze deeply, and diligently work out urgent opening problems, I carefully studied each new volume, feasting on everything that seemed the most theoretically valuable and interesting. This enormous flow of information offered the richest trove of material for research and directed preparation, both for tournaments and for particular opponents. Of course, any player may come up with an interpretation of his own creative endeavors: through these same years, the many volumes of Informants have published dozens, hundreds of my games, too. The best of them you will find collected on the accompanying CD.
