Играю против фигур

In forty years of tournament performances, I have played about three thousand games. In this multitude of works, which, of course, were not always successful, it was not difficult to find about a hundred such works worthy of a monograph. It turned out to be more difficult to decide what not to include in the book. Therefore, please excuse me for the fact that many victories over famous opponents or games awarded with special prizes did not make it into this book, and others that are included are no better than them.

In my sports career, I paid special attention to openings. My belief in a chess game as a logical truth forced me to work on its beginning so that it would turn out to be successful and so that all its other stages could form a single aesthetic whole with it. Therefore, the main criterion for selecting games was the presence of interesting opening ideas, so that the games would be instructive from the very beginning. In order to facilitate orientation, I arranged the games by openings, and inside them - in chronological order.