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Lessons with a Grandmaster

If you had actual lessons with a grandmaster, would you be brave enough to publish the transcripts? Well, someone did. And that someone wrote about it in book form — three books, to be precise. In this review, I present my thoughts on the first book in the book series Lessons with a Grandmaster.

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What can you expect from this book?

Lessons with a GM is written in collaboration between Boris Gulko and Joel Sneed. Gulko is a grandmaster who emigrated from the Soviet Union in the 1980s. According to Wikipedia, he is the only player to win the Soviet as well as US Chess championships. Sneed is a professor of psychology at Queens College in New York as well as an amateur player. 

In essence, this book is a game collection. There are 25 games in the book, all played by Gulko. There are some real heavyweights among his opponents, such as Kasparov, Karpov, Korchnoi, Seirawan, Yusupov, to name a few. However, the book differs from most game collections in a very interesting way; the annotations are made by both authors.

The basic premise is that Gulko presents his games and Sneed asks questions and suggests some lines. Of course, Gulko almost always finds something wrong with his co-writer's analyses. In that sense, the book has some resemblance to books like The Amateur's Mind and Heisman's The improving chess thinker. Here is an example of the exchanges between the authors.


Joel: Why not something simple like 11 b3 - ? There is no dark-squared bishop that might make this move dangerous.

Boris: White doesn't want to place his pawns on the same color as his bishop. Plus the game move might support a queenside pawn storm with the rook better placed on b1 than a1. Generally, there is not much difference between the two moves but 11 Rb1 allows more opportunity.

Joel: Now White cannot castle long. I like the plan of 11...d6, ...Be6, ... Rfc8, with play on the queenside.

Boris: The move you offered is inferior because of 11...d6 12 Nd5 Qd8 13 h4 and Black has simply lost time.


This kind of discussions is what sets this book apart from other game collections. I think it's a nice touch, and it enhances the instructional value of the book. Gulko highlights some typical mistakes in Sneed's analyses along with suggestions for how to improve on them. For the reader, this provides excellent learning opportunities, albeit not the same value as having a coach of your own.

Within each game, there are a number of exercises left for the reader, based on actual positions or analyses of the game. Gulko comments on this in the introduction:
At appropriate moments I will suggest assignments to find the right path. The assignments will be at five levels of difficulty. In each of the games, pose problems for you and the reader to solve, and you have been humble enough to make your thinking process known to everyone. I recommend that the reader solve these problems and to compare with both your analysis and mine. They will probably see similarities with your thinking process and my solutions are aimed to help correct the flaws in your reasoning.
After the presentation of each game, the authors provide a sort of summary where they reflect on what they find most interesting about it and what the main learning points are. I think that's a nice little feature.
 
In this case, the publisher has not provided a pdf sample, but you can take a peek via Amazon's "look inside" feature for more details.

In my review of Chess Fundamentals, I mentioned how I liked that Capablanca presents games he won and ones that he lost. This book does not fall into the same category. It is quite typical of many game collections; it only covers games that Gulko won. In my opinion, this is a weakness of this book. By showcasing some losses, the authors would have an opportunity to learn from typical (and even non-typical) mistakes. Frankly, many all of us would benefit from that.

If you are interested in taking a closer look at the games, I have collected all of them in a lichess study.

Lessons with a GM is a series of three volumes. I have only read the first one, which covers chess strategy and (supposedly) psychology. The second volume focuses on tactics and dynamic play and the third one is about combining tactics and strategy.

Who should read this book?

This book should be a good fit for players in the 1400-1800 range. It will be especially relevant for players who aim to improve their understanding of chess strategy. More advanced players might enjoy it for the games, but they will probably not get as much out of the annotations.

About this book

Author:Boris Gulko & Joel Sneed
Title:Lessons with a Grandmaster
Type of book:Chess improvement, Game collection
Level:Intermediate, (Advanced)
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