Irving Chernev

Irving Chernev ( born January 29, 1900 in Priluki, † September 29, 1981 in San Francisco ) was an American author of chess books.

Life

He came from a Jewish family in 1920 and emigrated to the USA where he worked as a music teacher. He had learned with 12 years The game of chess. Although he never brought it to the championship title, he had excellent knowledge of the chess scene and was personally acquainted with many top players. He had a large private chess library, and said of himself that probably no other man read so many chess books and replayed games as he did. He especially admired the works of Siegbert Tarrasch, whose book Three hundred chess games he called his Bible. He always carried a notebook with him in which he had jotted down interesting positions he likes vorführte front of an audience.

Chernev was a prolific author and has published more than twenty books on chess. The written together with Kenneth Harkness textbook An invitation to chess (1945 ) was a great success with six -digit sales figures. The novel concept of this work was that to each train a diagram has been mapped, so that the reading without chessboard was possible. Very popular was his book Logical chess move by move ( 1957) in which 33 master games train for train were clearly explained to weaker players could follow the comments. In 1998 appeared a new edition of this work (ISBN 0-7134-8464-0 ). Several books he published together with Fred Reinfeld, another well-known chess writers, including Winning Chess (1948) and The Fireside book of chess (1949 ).

In the American chess magazine Chess Review Chernev headed since October 1937 an irregularly appearing column on endgame studies. In 1947 he published the book of this material Chessboard magic, a sequel under the title 200 brilliant endgames (ISBN 0-671-67284-3 ) was published posthumously in 1989.

After his retirement, he moved with his wife Selma from New York to San Francisco, where he died at the age of 81 years to cancer.