Quality Chess has, with help from Jacob Aagard, produced two books by GM Boris Gelfand in 2015, "POSITIONAL DECISION MAKING IN CHESS" and "DYNAMIC DECISION MAKING IN CHESS".

With two to four diagrams a page, running to 266 pages together with an interview at the end, the book's games can be gone through faster than the size suggests.

Having said which, in terms of chess content, the lessons of this book will be inaccessible to all but the strongest of chess players, perhaps 2000 or 2200 up. The reason for this is Gelfand's unique approach to the game. As a heir in style to Akiba Rubinstein, he presents his game alongside the great magic-wielder with rook endings, showing how to apply a squeeze, how to use space, how not to hurry, how to transform pawn structures and how to transform advantages.

The games are all from praxis at the highest level. Some analysis is presented here for the first time, but this is higher quality and more detailed analysis than you will find, for example, in New In Chess.

Some will find the chapter on "Squeeze" a bit dry.

Gelfand throughout provides sidebars, anecdotes and honest personal impressions of former Soviet greats, trainers, little-known figures. Also he unstintingly gives praise to some GMs like the Chinese Wang Yue and his endgame skill (bishops). His respect for the game and for its top practitioners such as GM Anand and GM Svidler is evident.

He is at pains to point out how computers spoil chess. For one to improve, one must watch chess games unaided by computers. His examples illustrating what the computer understands and does not, are illuminating.

He says about one game he annotes for 9(!) pages, Gelfand - Wang Yue (Medias 2010):
"This is the next critical moment. An amusing thing is that at move 40 my computer gave me +5.00 but at the same time it could easily have been a fortress, making the human evaluation 0.00 (though I had no fear that this was actually a fortress). It is therefore not relevant to consider this position from the aspect of computer evaluaton. White is better, but he will have to do something to break through. This might reduce the computer's appreciation of the position, but winning the game is about delivering the deadly blow not about mathematics. [..] I think that part of whatever success I have had in chess is because I have a decent feeling for when this sort of advise if useful and I follow it when it makes sense"

There is, scattered through the book, sufficient biographical information and ungrudging chess and personal opinion given by Gelfand, enhanced by some family pictures and a drawing by his daughter of a bespectacled Gelfand at a chessboard.

What is great about the book is Gelfand's style of explaining almost every key position in a high level GM match, and his penchant for introducing a related game or a historical or personal anecdote.

I found the book idiosyncratic, at times verbose, from a chessic point of view extremely difficult (the choice of games were typically long, long term maneuvering affairs with little tactics), but not hard to read quickly.

Given GM Gelfand's great and illustrious career, one must hail the publication of these two books after his most memorable games were got out by Olms. But I suspect, it would take a very strong reader rated Karpov -500 to absorb all of this. ( )