"Paul Keres, Photographs and Games", compiled by Hendrik Olde, 1995, Demerlein Ltd., Figurine Algebraic Notation, Hardcover, 479pp., $49.95. In 1975 the great Estonian grandmaster Paul Keres (born 1916) died suddenly at the relatively early age of 59. A perennial world championship contender, and for the remarkably long span of thirty years (ca. 1936-65) among the top five or ten players in the world, Keres was greatly esteemed by his countrymen. In 1976 the Estonian government decided to commission a memorial to his renowned chess career: as complete a collection as humanly possible of his games. "Paul Keres, Photographs and Games" is the long-delayed product of that effort. I will not mince words, nor delay review-readers who like quick verdicts. As a long-time Keres admirer, I wanted very much to like this book, but for the most part it leaves me cold. It is in some ways a commendable effort, but rather short of what it might and should have been. Paul Keres played some of the most imaginative, colorful, exciting chess ever seen, and was involved in some of most turbulent times and controversial issues in the history of the game, but for interest and excitement "PKPG" ranks with reading actuarial tables, or mutual fund quotations in a flat market. The flavor of the book is perhaps best conveyed by a dry recital of its contents: Pages 5-8: a half-page foreword by Keres' widow Maria, in Estonian, English, Spanish, and German. Pages 9-32: a 4-page preface (in Icelandic) by former FIDE president GM Fridrik Olafsson, briefly describing Keres and his career, and a two-page appendix (in Estonian, uncredited, presumably by the compiler Olde) discussing compilation of the games and thanking various contributors. Both translated into English, Spanish, and German. Pages 33-30: 10 games annotated Informant-style, based on notes by Keres. Pages 41-453: 1,944 games, arranged mostly chronologically, dated from 1929 to 1975. None annotated. Pages 457-479: Index of games (by opponent and "ECO" code), Keres' tournament and match record, and a table of contents by event. Interspersed here and there is the odd tournament crosstable, but that's about it. According to Maria Keres' foreword, the goal of "PKPG"'s editors was to produce an "academic collection" for international reference. Apparently this meant virtually eliminating anything not as universally comprehensible as figurine algebraic, leaving only the bare bones of a book. Except for Olafsson's brief preface, there is no biographical or historical narrative, nothing to flesh out Keres as a man nor tell us any of the setting, background, or significance of any of those 1,944 games, only ten of which are annotated (and those in the robotic Informant-style). I have, quite literally, read more exciting seed catalogs. Of course, no book featuring Keres games can be entirely dull. As a producer of brilliancies he was on a par with Morphy, Alekhine, or Tal, as here against Gligoric at Zurich, 1959: (See Diagram) White: Kf1, Qe7, Rb1, Rd1, Nf3, Ng4, Bc2; pawns - a4, c3, e4, f2, g2, h3 Black: Kg8, Qc7, Rd8, Rf8, Nd7, Nd3, Bc8; pawns - a6, c4, e5, f6, g6, h7 34. Rxd3! cd3 34. Bb3+ Kh8 35. Nxf6! Rxf6 36. Ng5 Rxf2+ 37. Kg1! Rf1+ 38. Kh2, 1-0. Actually, to say Keres was "on a par with Tal" is perhaps to do him an injustice. Arguably he was superior, because with his great ability for deep analysis Keres could often find the hidden flaw in Tal's impetuous, intuitive sacrifices, as in this game in the 1959 Bled Candidates tournament, when Tal was only a few months from becoming world champion: Tal-Keres, 1959: 1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. Nc3 Bb4 4. f3 d5 5. a3 Be7 6. e4 de4 7. fe4 e5 8. d5 Bc5 9. Bg5 a5 10. Nf3 Qe7 11. Bd3 Nbd7 12. Qe2 h6 13. Bd2 c6 14. Na4 Bd4 15. Nxd4 ed4 16. Bf4 Ne5 17. Nb6 Bg4 18. Qc2 Nxd3 19. Qxd3 Ra6 20. 0-0 (See Diagram) Tal apparently believes White's attacking chances will compensate for leaving the Knight en prise. Keres says "Thanks for the material" and defends with great accuracy. 20. ... Rxb6 21. Bd6 Qxd6 22. e5 Qe7 23. Rae1 Nd7 24. e6 fe6 25. c5 Nxc5 26. Qg6+ Kd8 27. b4 ab4 28. Qxg4 cd5 29. Qg3 Nd7 30. ab4 Rf8 31. Rxf8 Qxf8 32. b5 e5 33. Ra1 Kc7 34. Rc1+ Kb8 35. Qb3 Nf6 36. Qc2 Qd8 37. Qa4 Ne4 38. Rf1 Nd6 39. Qa3 Rxb5 40. Ra1 Qb6, 0-1. (See Diagram for final position.) That the book has nearly 2,000 of such a player's games is its chief strength. I can recommend it on that basis for those seeking to own the most complete Keres collection available. However, without annotations the majority of those games will be incomprehensible to many readers. Also, I cannot help but mention that today anyone with a computer can easily access comparable compilations without the book. For example, the *Essentia* CD-ROM database contains 1,674 game by Keres. When one can, for about $80, have nearly as many Keres games plus about 998,000 more, it makes little sense to spend $50 for a book that offers little but his games alone. I would guess that computer use is not as prevalent in Estonia as in the United States, but the economic facts are that for a book to make a dent in the American marketplace, it must offer something not readily available for a better price on other media. "PKPG"'s other (relatively minor) point of interest is its 27 pages of photographs. These range from a stiffly posed portrait of Keres' parents as a young couple, to somber views of Keres' 1975 funeral in Tallinn. We see Keres' maturation from a rail- thin bony youth to a round-faced, gray-haired gentleman in his last year of life, looking rather older than his 59 years. There is an amusing shot of Alekhine, holding a Siamese cat and smiling a smug, devilish grin. There is a view of Keres' wife Maria (a lovely face), and of their two children. Seeing these, it is not surprising to me that Keres risked the wrath of Stalin's secret police to rejoin them in 1944. Still, there is much lacking. Keres was one of the most important figures in the history of chess, his life had much drama, and he was at the center of two of the great (and still unresolved) controversies of chess history, Hague-Moscow 1948 and Curacao 1962. To have almost no narrative or discussion of any important events in Keres' career, in a book ostensibly dedicated to his memory, seems to me a serious error of omission. It is perhaps "PKPG"'s tragedy that it should appear about the same time as Skinner and Verhoeven's "Alexander Alekhine's Chess Games, 1902-1946" (McFarland Co., 1998). This tremendously impressive work, combining exhaustive game compilation, many with annotations, plus extensive commentary and historical narrative, has set a new standard for a book of this type. "PKPG" suffers by comparison. [Interested readers may access Kingston's review of the Alekhine book in The Chess Cafe Archives - HWR] Given certain problems hinted at by Maria Keres in her foreword, the social upheaval of the past decade in the former Soviet Union, and the fact that the book took nearly twenty years to complete, I strongly suspect that funding and a steady work force for the Keres project were hard to come by in Estonia. With an adequate budget, more pages for annotation and narrative, possibly with multiple translations, might have been possible. I can sympathize with Olde *et al*, who obviously accomplished a lot with limited resources, but I cannot help but feel that so much more was possible and fitting. In sum, "Paul Keres, Photographs and Games" stands somewhere between two biographical works recently discussed in this space. It stands well above and avoids the ludicrous flaws of Charuchin's "Chess Comet Charousek", but falls well short of Skinner and Verhoeven's "Alekhine". Keres, hardly any less important than Alekhine in chess history, deserved better.