On the Origin: Reading Journal

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.
Francis Bacon, "Of Studies" (1625)

Willy Hendriks, On the Origin of Good Moves (2020) arrived yesterday. I spent an hour last night and a bit more than an hour this morning leafing through the whole book, reading a few pages here and there. Then I reread the chapter on Greco. I had read the Kindle sample in June after Brian Karen asked me about this book in reference to my post on the Chess Book Collectors's Facebook page concerning Peter J. Monté, The Classical Era of Modern Chess (2014). Do look at "Monumental Scholarship: Notes Toward a Book Review" for my initial assessment of Monté's text. Hendriks' book looked interesting, so I preordered the paperback. It shipped Tuesday on the date listed by Amazon as the publication date.

Although I use almost every one of my nearly 400 chess books principally as reference works and rarely read one all the way through, On the Origin of Good Moves may join the small rank of exceptions. In order to encourage myself to keep at it, this post begins a reading journal on my progress.

Hendriks has an ambitious agenda to challenge the common notion that William Steinitz initiated the modern notions of positional play. This myth, he argues, is the work of Emanuel Lasker. He states that he wanted to write a whodunnit, but self-deprecates his writing abilities and so identifies the culprit immediately (10). Even so, Hendriks's take concerning the development of chess history is about the details more than the plot.

He also begins by noting the recapitulation theory of chess development offered by Max Euwe, Garry Kasparov, and others. I summarized this view in my 2013 workbook for students in my summer chess camp, "Dragon Chess Camp 2013: Learning from the First Chess Masters":

No one is born a chess master. Euwe suggests that an individual player's growth from beginner to master follows the pattern of chess history. First players learn to play like Greco. Then, as Philidor, they discover the importance of pawns and begin to think positionally. Individual growth moves through attacking play in the style of Adolph Anderssen and Paul Morphy to learning to accumulate small advantages in the manner of Wilhelm Steinitz. (26)

I went on from there, but this excerpt serves to illustrate that I have found Euwe's concept compelling at least pedagogically. Hendriks correctly links the recapitulation theory to Ernst Haeckel: "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" (9, 411). The structure of On the Origin of Good Moves--a title clearly derived from Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1859)--follows the pattern evident in Euwe, The Development of Chess Style (1968), but in a manner that interrogates with skepticism the central claims that have been advanced by many chess writers along the way.

Journal: "Footnotes to Greco"

The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.
Alfred North Whitehead (1979)

Hendriks notes that Greco has not received the same honor given to Plato that all of chess theory is a series of footnotes to his original work, although a few months ago I wrote, partly in jest, in a chess forum, "Greco is the originator; all others are imitators." I have taken the work of Greco seriously for some time, found Euwe's annotations of two Greco games useful and inspiring, have played at least three games online that almost wholly follow one of Greco's masterpieces (see "Near Perfect"), and have been convinced since at least 2013 that the best parts of Greco remain unknown to most chess players.

As I had read Hendriks' chapters on Greco several weeks ago, it should not be surprising that I scored 100% on the two quizzes from Greco's games this morning. I missed the second one, however, in June because I chose Greco's move and Hendriks was looking for the improvement. When I took that quiz in June, the game from which exercise 2 was extracted had been part of my lesson with my chess students the previous week. However, I was using a version of the game that was not in any databases, but can be found in Francis Beale's 1656 text. Chessgames.com has it now because I submitted it after researching the game score in Monté. In June, I finished a project of entering all 94 of Beale's selections from Greco into a database.

Black to move

This position appears in five games in ChessBase Mega 2020. Four are Greco's games. 10...Kd7 appears in two Greco games in the database, 10...Kd8 appears in one, and as Hendriks notes, 10...Kf8 appears in one of Greco's games in the database (19-20). The position after 10...Kf8 is Hendriks second exercise. In this one, and one in the second set, Greco's move is not the best move.

The version of the game given by Hendriks ended with checkmate in 14 moves. The version of the game in Beale, however, continues with much more stubborn defense. Monté's research reveals that the better game appears in several of the London manuscripts created in 1623 by Greco. The better version also appears in William Lewis, Gioachino Greco on the Game of Chess (1819).

All this is to say that Hendriks' historical questions differ from mine. While I can spend many hours tracking down minutiae through original sources, or secondary works that are grounded is such sources, Hendriks builds his assessment of Greco on readily available databases. What do Greco's games offer the aspiring chess player? More than he usually gets credit for, Hendriks argues.

Despite approaching work on Greco from a somewhat different perspective regarding the nature of historical research, I am encouraged by the assessment in On the Origin of Good Moves: "Greco's legacy is really impressive" (23). I agree.

There are two chapters and two quizzes on Greco in Hendriks's book. This position is number 8--the second exercise for chapter 2: "The Nimzowitsch of the 17th Century" (27-38).

Black to move

This position is from Greco's longest game, and one of the few that Hendriks thinks might represent actual play. His annotations on this game are brief but highlight the critical point: Philidor's reputation for discovering the importance of the pawns is but a footnote to Greco.