Wednesday, September 27, 2023

Jeremy Silman, 1954-2023

Source: amazon.com

Jeremy Silman had just passed away at the age of 69. We have many of his books, from How to Reassess Your Chess and The Amateur's Mind to his co-authored (auto)biography of Pal Benko, which is an excellent book. Always original in his thinking, Silman never wrote a meretricious book. Some of his books are better than others, but he always did his best - some of his books are very good, like Benko's biography. 

Edward Winter's obituary adds that Silman was interested in chess history, and - like Winter himself - had great admiration for the games of the old masters, such as Gioacchino Greco, who was in Silman's estimation, "centuries ahead of his time" in chess understanding, more so than any other player in history. Curiously, he thinks Greco would have easily defeated Philidor

One thing I noted about Silman's work is that when a new edition of his books came out, it was really new. It wasn't just the same book with minor changes. Silman always put a lot of work into improving the new edition over the older one. 

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