Free Chess Book

Chesscafe.com are giving away a free 110 page book in PDF format:-

"Secret Matches:
The Unpublished Games of Mikhail Botvinnik

Selected Games Annotated and Theoretical Section by Jan Timman"

http://www.chesscafe.com/skittles/skittles.htm

Just go to the link, download the book and save it to your computer.

The book consists of over 100 games by the World Champion Mikhail Botvinnik. There are some fantastic annotations by Jan Timman.

Can't be bad for free!

David, did you open the document? At least for me, the diagrams were complete gibberish. It looks like the diagrams didn't convert from the old Chesscafe reader format to PDF. (I'm using the latest version of Adobe reader, 7.0.8) If I'm not doing something I should, please let me know. Thanks.

Originally posted by Mad Rook
David, did you open the document? At least for me, the diagrams were complete gibberish. It looks like the diagrams didn't convert from the old Chesscafe reader format to PDF. (I'm using the latest version of Adobe reader, 7.0.8) If I'm not doing something I should, please let me know. Thanks.

Yes, I opened it and all the diagrams and everything seem fine.

I'm using an older version of Abode though - Adobe Reader version 6.

So perhaps there's a problem with the new version.

Works with Adobe Reader 7.0

Thanks 🙂

Hmm, it didn't work for me with Adobe 5.0. Maybe I should download it again. (Maybe my copy was corrupted.) At least I know it works for someone. Thanks!

Yay, I downloaded a fresh copy, and it worked just fine! The copy I downloaded this morning was smaller (378 KB), and in addition to the gibberish diagrams, the notations were bold letters instead of figurine fonts. I don't know whether they had a bad version on there when I downloaded it this morning (and later replaced with a fixed copy), or if my copy was just incomplete. (I think my download this morning signalled that it was complete, but I'm not sure I'd bet money on it.)

At any rate, the new copy looks great! Thanks for your input, guys, I'm not sure if I would have thought to try the download again on my own.

That was a good find, thanks David. The way I got mine was going there and viewing the one from online, then just saving it onto my computer. No downloading nessacary.

Strange though, when I tried opening it adobe 'encountered errors' so I just kept trying that and it eventually worked. Now it's fine.

Originally posted by prosoccer
No downloading nessacary.

Well, it had to be downloaded one way or the other. If you open the file online, the document has to be downloaded from the site to your PC before you can view the entire document. So you did download it. Like the Fram filter guy says, "You can pay me now or you can pay me later." :-)

You seem to know more about this than me.

bump