Stuart Rachels isn’t exactly a household name in the chess world. As a fairly obscure IM who left competitive chess many years before I was even born, I had not even heard of him before August 2020. Still it seems that he has stayed in the chess world, as the recent release of his book The Best I Saw in Chess suggests. And it is this much acclaimed book (the Chess Journalists of America’s 2020 Best Book award winner) that I am going to be taking a deeper look at today.
The Best I Saw in Chess is a hefty tome, clocking in at over 400 pages. It chronicles Rachels’ relatively short but distinguished career of 14 years, in which he eventually achieved a rating of over 2600 USCF. However, the way Rachels looks back at his career is anything but conventional. He doesn’t go through a checklist of his tournaments but instead branches his games into different categories, such as Tactical Snippets (Chapter 4), Assorted Endings (Chapter 6), Impressions of the Greats (Chapter 12), and so on and so forth.
This unusual format (for a memoir anyway) makes for a very wide-ranging book, and one that is accessible to many readers. Indeed, there are many stories of even the best players in the world: seeing the first chapter (Losing Benonis to Kasparov), I gained a lot of respect for this little known IM.
But this book is not just stories. His analysis is top-notch, and made in a method separate from many other authors. According to the preface (Human and Computer Assistance), Rachels analyzed the games the old fashioned way, with a real board. Of course many corrections were certainly made to his original analysis, but this fact gives the analysis a much more human feel that some other books lack nowadays.
With all of this said, what are Rachels’ qualifications to write this type of memoir? What are his achievements? In fact there were many in his brief career. For one thing, he was the youngest USCF National Master at the time of his achievement (11 years and change). Along with that he finished highly in World Youth (under 16) events, and later won the U.S. Junior Championship (thus qualifying for the U.S. Closed Championship) despite having enrolled in college by this point.
But none of these highlights are his true swan song. In the 1989 U.S. Closed Championship Rachels was by far the lowest seed. With a USCF rating of under 2600, he was surely expected to be a target for the top finishers. Instead, the unthinkable happened: he played brilliantly, scored 9.5/15, and tied for first in the tournament at the age of twenty! Very impressive indeed.
With this victory Rachels also qualified for the 1990 Interzonal (a qualifier for the Candidates matches). It seemed like his chess career was on a big upswing and that he would make GM in short order. And yet… following the 1990 Interzonal he abruptly quit tournament play to focus on his college work. He is currently working as a philosophy professor at the University of Alabama. His father (James Rachels) was also a noted philosopher, but I digress.
All things considered, this is a book of extremely high value, and well worth its ~$30 price. His writing is quite eloquent, and as the back cover promised I could hardly put it down. The stories were very well told, and the analysis is both accurate and human – an increasingly difficult task to achieve with computers taking over the chess world. There is even an appendix containing an explanation of adjournments, principles of play, and book recommendations.
This is a book I will come back to time and again. Pent up knowledge seems to almost seep from the pages, and I highly recommend that any serious chess student consider adding The Best I Saw in Chess to their library.
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