Tuesday, July 26, 2005

Australian Chess Into the 80's

One of the best chess books I ever read is GM Rogers' Australian Chess Into the 80's - written before he became a grandmaster. As far as I am concerned, it ranks in importance to such famous tournament books as 1953 Zurich or the Second Piatigorsky Cup. The book is basically about the 1980 Australian Chess Championships in Adelaide.

The best bit about this book is that many players contributed to the annotations. Also, there are pen portraits, written by Guy West, of the four leading players at that time: Rogers, Hjorth, Jamieson and Johansen.

If this book is not presently in your collection, then I suggest you go out and look for one. It's indespensable. All we're waiting for now is a follow-up from GM Rogers. Australian Chess Into the 21st Century perhaps?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Your choice of a favourite book is one of my favourites too. In fact I can still recall three wonderful days reading and re-reading the chapter on the Caro-Kann in that book. Three days when I was on jury duty but not called for a trial until near the end of the third day. And then I was nearly panelled in the Dan Murphy trial that went 3 months. Wheww.

Anonymous said...

I actually have that book in my collection of chess books!

Does anyone know what happened to Greg Hjorth? I searched on the internet and deduced that he went on to the States to study and became a FM (or IM?) or was he already one before he left?

The Closet Grandmaster said...

He's an IM and, according to FIDE, now belongs to the USCF federation.