Publisher: Chess Evolution, 2016, Pages: 121, Paperback
(Aanbieding: 6x Legendary Chess Careers met 10% korting)
My interview with Nona Gaprindashvili took place almost a decade ago. The original idea was to make a book of interviews with former world class players who made it to the World Championship Candidates matches, and one interview with the female player who dominated women s chess during almost all of the sixties and seventies.
Unlike present day top players, former greats can talk much more freely about their secrets and approaches to chess. Also, the achievements of the world champions are well known, but we know less about women s world champions. However, the original idea never materialised. Grandmaster Csaba Balogh came up with the alternative idea to make separate books of these interviews, as he thought there was enough rich material in each interview for a whole book. I am grateful to him for this.
The first two books of the series were on Timman and Portisch. Fortunately, these books were successful, and Chess Evolution decided to publish some more. In this book you can read fi rstly the original interview with Gaprindashvili. As it is a whole book on the Georgian women s world champion, I was able to provide more material than original planned, so I happily analysed further superb games from the Georgian chess legend. She was also kind enough to answer further questions from me, so a second, shorter interview can be found in this book as well.
I would like to express my gratitude to the many people who helped with this book. First the strong players Maya Chiburdanidze, Ketevan Arakhamia, Zurab Azmaiparashvili and Maria Ivánka who know Gaprindashvili very well and wrote appraisals about their contemporary. Dave Path and Nick Aplin helped me with the English in the interviews. I also would like to express my gratitude to Sylvester Urban for raising the level of my English in the second part of the book. Robin Yu also contributed a bit to that part. Natalia Edgzveradz gave invaluable encouragement and inspiration during the writing process. Of course, the biggest thanks go to Gaprindashvili herself, who was kind enough to give the interviews. I hope the quality of the book will please her. For the second part of the book, I selected games using a slightly different method than in the fi rst part where I mainly focused on the quality of the games. In the second part I focused on two things: games that Gaprindashvili won at very important moments in her career, and games that resulted in Gaprindashvili achieving a new career high, such as at World Championship
matches and Olympiads. These victories illustrate how strong she was, but they will also serve at least two more purposes: they will entertain you and one can learn a lot from them.
Excerpt
