By Vladimir Kramnik, Iakov Damsky

Amazon.com Review:
Vladimir Kramnik is whatever of an anomaly within the chess international, a top-seeded
grandmaster who has refused to dedicate all his power to the sport. "By nature, I am
not ambitious," he says. however, the Russian-born prodigy has controlled to float
to the head of the chess global, ranked simply in the back of champion Garry Kasparov on the turn
of the millennium.

The subtitle to Kramnik's ebook is "My existence and Games," yet there's, actually, little
distinction among the 2; the sport has ruled Kramnik's lifestyles from the age of 5.
By age sixteen, he used to be enjoying at the global chess scene, and at age 25, in 2000, he's one
of the few gamers who can usually carry his personal opposed to Kasparov.

Kramnik reads much less like a conventional autobiography than a transcript of 50-plus
games from his occupation. They contain key fits with Kasparov, Karpov, Anand,
Topalov, Ivanchuk, Shirov, and different greats, stretching again to 1984. Colorful
biographical tidbits look among video games, delivering glimpses of Kramnik's life
outside chess--we research he's a awful cook dinner, suffers insomnia from the strain of the
game, and attempts to stick philosophical approximately successful and wasting. yet so much revealing
are the inner dialogues that accompany his suits; they're deeply annotated.
Kramnik explains precisely what used to be operating via his head as he driven a pawn or
sacrificed a queen at key issues, and it's a wonder to observe his brain at paintings. His
comments are by no means smug or even betray a self-effacing wit--a clean change
in a occupation recognized for its outsize egos. Chess fanatics may still locate lots to
occupy them in Kramnik and could do good to take a web page from his playbook.
--Demian McLean

From the again Cover
Since he first burst onto the realm chess scene in 1992, exhibiting a adulthood of
play a long way past his 16 years, Vladimir Kramnik has been tipped as a destiny World
Champion. nonetheless purely in his mid-twenties, he's now firmly consolidated in the
world's most sensible 3. He has received quite a few tournaments in lots of international locations, and is one of
the only a few gamers frequently to carry his personal with Kasparov. This ebook, Kramnik's
first, describes his lifestyles and chess occupation, starting together with his strange formative years. It
features greater than 50 of his top video games, deeply annotated, plus a variety of additional
games and video game extracts, together with a few from quickplay and blindfold occasions. (7 x 9
3/4, 240 pages, illustrations)