Richard Réti

“Réti was a very strong player, who died at the age of 40, unfortunately. He once played 29 games simultaneously, blindfolded. He was a tremendous talent. His particular claim to fame is that he was a great theoretician, and invented his own opening, which still bears his name – the Réti opening. He was one of the leaders of a revolutionary philosophical movement in chess, called the hypermodern school. The hypermoderns overturned certain preconceptions which had become, perhaps, too rigidly adhered to, like the view that you had to occupy the centre at all costs. But this book, Masters of the Chessboard, isn’t a polemical work. It’s beautifully written. What Réti does is he looks at all the great chess players of the past, going back to the mid-19th century, up to his own time. He analyses the style of the individual players and explains what they brought to the game. You get a sense of their character and personality, also because he played a lot of these people in his short career.” Read more...

The Best Books About Chess

Dominic Lawson, Journalist