Over the past few years the great chess player Garry Kasparov has written five 

best-selling books praising the contributions to chess made by the previous 

world champions. The series is called ''My Great Predecessors''. As a reaction to 

this wonderful series of books, leading chess writer Tibor Károlyi has written this 

imaginary sixth volume. In gently humorous – but chessically serious – style, the 

author imagines Kasparov is annotating over 70 of his own lost games, and 

blaming all these defeats on the bad influence of each of the previous world 

champions, providing in-depth analysis to show how he was misled by them. 

The book also serves as a highly instructive, practical chess book – to beat 

Kasparov, the greatest player of all time, took some pretty special chess, and 

readers will enjoy learning from this. It is astonishing how the author has 

managed to find so many games that exhibit uncanny similarities between 

Kasparov and his predecessors, which makes the content of the book extremely 

plausible – as if Kasparov himself were writing it. This is a brilliant and totally 

original chess book that could only have been written by someone with great 

knowledge of Kasparov and the past world champions.