Richard Selig Réti Selected Annotated (2 results)

Soft cover. Condition: Very Good. x+173+[5 ad] pages with tables, diagrams and indexes. Octavo (8 1/2" x 5 1/4") bound in original publisher's pictorial wrappers. First published in 1954. Richard Réti was an Austro-Hungarian, later Czechoslovakian chess player, chess author, and composer of endgame studies. He was one of the principal proponents of hypermodernism in chess. With the exception of Nimzowitsch's book My System, he is considered to be the movement's foremost literary contributor. One of the top players in the world during the 1910s and 1920s, he began his career as a combinative classical player, favoring openings such as the King's Gambit (1.e4 e5 2.f4). After the end of the First World War, however, his playing style changed, and he became one of the principal proponents of hypermodernism, along with Aron Nimzowitsch and others. With the exception of Nimzowitsch's book My System, he is considered to be the movement's foremost literary contributor. He had his greatest early successes in the period 1918 through 1921, in tournaments in Kaschau (Koice; 1918), Rotterdam (1919), Amsterdam (1920), Vienna (1920), and Gothenburg (1921). In 1925 Réti set a world record for blindfold chess with 29 games played simultaneously. He won 21, drew 6, and lost 2. Condition: Edge wear, corners bumped and rubbed, spine sunned else very good.

Hardcover. Condition: Very Good. Dust Jacket Condition: Good. 1st Edition. x+173 pages with diagrams, table and indices. Octavo (8 3/4" x 5 3/4") bound in red cloth with gilt lettering to spine in facsimile pictorial jacket. (Betts: 29-125) First American edition. Contains 70 fully annotated games, 15 studies composed by Reti, a short biography and a table of tournament and match results. Of all the great hypermodern chess founders, the most interesting is Richard Reti. Although born a Hungarian in 1889, he later was deemed a Czechoslovakian after World War I when they moved the country boundaries around. But he always felt himself to be Viennese, since he went to college in Vienna. So he was a 3-country man. The four famous hypermodern chess founders are Breyer, Reti, Nimzowitch, and Tartakower. Reti was the author of two of the finest book on chess, Modern Ideas in Chess and Masters of the Chessboard. He won a number of great tournaments, Gothenberg 1920 and Teplitz-Schonau 1922 being among the most notable, and in doing so produced a large number of beautiful games. This book contains a selection of the best of these culled from all stages of Reti's career. Readers of Reti's books will enjoy the games as the very best possible illustrating his principles. Students of theory will find valuable help in the numerous Reti's openings contained in the book; while the lover of combative play will be pleasantly surprised by the remarkable number of brilliant ideas to be observed in the games. Condition: Corners bumped, some soiling. Facsimile jacket taken from a good copy which was soiled and chipped at spine ends and corers else a very good copy in a facsimile jacket.