Three Days with Bobby Fischer and Other Chess Essays: How to Meet Champions & Choose Your Openings is a chess book you can sit back comfortably in your armchair and just read. Or, when you feel like getting the pieces out of the box and learning from some great games, tactics and strategiesthat's all here as well. Nearly everyone with an interest in chess shares the same two questions:

What were the great champions like?
How can I choose opening moves that give me a good game?

Chess Hall-of-Famer and three-time US Champion Lev Alburt teams up with World Chess Hall of Fame Executive Director and Chess Journalist of the Year Award winner Al Lawrence to answer these questions and tell the intriguing, inspiring and sometimes downright bizarre behind-the-scenes stories of the chess greats and near-greats, and how, above all else, they were men of their times.

Steinitz, who codified the rules of good playbefore going berserk
Lasker, the chessboard Freudian who wielded psychological weapons
Capablanca, dashingly handsome and to whom everything came easy
Alekhine, a dsiplaced person who gave up drink to win
Under-rated Euwe, the last amateur to become world champion
Botvinnik, who refrained from sex to preserve his phosphorus
Smyslov, an amateur opera singer who brought chess and artist' touch
Tal, whose gaze and red-hot sacrifices wilted even the toughest wills
Petrosian, who through chess became a paradoxa Soviet bourgeois
Spassky, irreverent attacker who bowed to enigmatic Bobby Fischer
Karpov, the positional boa constrictor of the board
Kasparov, the char8smatic boxer-chess-player who's still at the top.

And many more great players of the past and present who never made it to the very top, but nevertheless left their indelible mark on the game.