A First Book of Morphy

Hat tip to Blue Devil Knight for mentioning A First Book of Morphy by Frisco Del Rosario in his chessplanner. I just finished the book, and enjoyed it very much.

Heisman and others recommend that beginners start with open games; in the same vein, they recommend that study of master games begins with Morphy and others from the period of swashbuckling chess on the open board. I've investigated other Morphy books, but the annotations weren't as detailed as I'd like, or were geared towards more experienced players.

As the author notes in the introduction,

The best way to practice chess, according to Purdy, is to play through a master's games while covering the master's moves and guessing at them in turn. That exercise is most useful when the master's moves are simple and straightforward and based on principle, for when the student guesses incorrectly, he might more easily deduce the master's intent. Morphy's games are excellent for this kind of study.

I've already gone through Logical Chess: Move by Move. I liked it, but most of the games weren't the openings I play; many Queen's Gambit Declined, few Giuoco Pianos. Compare that to A First Book of Morphy: 14 Evans Gambits, 16 (!) Kings Gambits, 6 Two Knights Defense...and a single, lonely Queen's Gambit Declined. The games and annotations covered the simple themes I'm working with now: active play, coordinating pieces, developing with threats, seizing and keeping the initiative; when threatened, first look to see if you have a bigger threat.

To be clear, by design this book is aimed squarely at the beginner. The games are heavily annotated. Simple traps are pointed out clearly. At my level, I consider this a feature, not a bug.

The prose is entertaining; for example,

Plans must be flexible. It might have been your plan to read to the end of this section, or to the end of the page before getting a drink, but when your cat starts knocking cans off the top of the refrigerator, you might have to change your mind. Opponents and cats are like that -- they have their own ideas, and you often have to deal with theirs first.

The book is built around the framework of Reuben Fine's 30 chess principles from Chess the Easy Way: 10 opening principles, 10 middlegame principles, and 10 endgame principles. (You can find the list of principles in the First Book of Morphy link above; look at the table of contents.) At first, I was wondering if the author would have difficulty finding Morphy games for each of the 30 principles, but it wasn't a problem; each of the 30 principles has one or more well-chosen games by Morphy to illustrate the point. Note that the full games are always presented, not just the part of the game that relates to the principle under discussion.

Del Rosario also references Purdy's distillation of the 30 principles into two: use inactive force, and examine moves that smite.

The principles are useful enough, though only a couple of the ideas felt new to me (e.g. it is worth a pawn to get a rook on the seventh rank if there are 4 or more enemy pawns.) In the end, the value to me was the heavily annotated games, illustrating active play on an open board.

For an example of the annotation style, view the excerpt at the amazon link above.