The Rookie

Last week, we decided that "Respect your chess" was going to be one of our key phrases, along with "Adopt a hero", "Keep the tension" and "Drink like a grandmaster". But, unfortunately, respecting your chess costs money.

Dr Short is adamant that I must invest in ChessBase, a computer program with 2.6 million games - the whole history of top-level chess on one disc - and the Fritz analysis engine. That would set me back £100, with no guarantee that I'll be able to work out how to operate it (I am a rampant technophobe as well as a very modest chess player). I will have to enlist the help of my computer-literate son and his high-grade PC. Even then, will I have the patience to play through 2.6 million games? This respect business is getting out of hand.

Short also wants me to read some books - something I have resolutely resisted in my 37 years playing chess. Nor am I the only one. A woman chess player once asked Short to recommend a book that would improve her play. He gave her a title. "Oh, my father's already got that," she said. In fact, her father already had about 500 chess books; she just hadn't bothered to read them. Owning a book on the Grünfeld defence does not, by some process of osmosis, teach you how to play the Grünfeld defence. I have had a similar disappointment with The Brothers Karamazov.

Morphy's Games of Chess will be a must for my chess library. Only 400 of his games are extant, so we may be able to survey his entire career. Short also says I should look at former world champion Garry Kasparov's ongoing series, My Great Predecessors, which is up to volume four, with several more promised - ultra-deep studies of games (Short says I shouldn't worry if I lose my way among the thickets of analysis), plus fascinating insights into the characters of the great players of the past. Bang goes another £100.

Short makes three further recommendations: Fire on Board, the games of the Latvian tactical wizard Alexei Shirov, for sheer entertainment value; Raymond Keene's Aron Nimzowitsch: A Reappraisal - another Latvian (Nimzowitsch, not Keene), a deep and complex thinker about the game and the father of a chess system called "hypermodernism" (we may start discussing this by column 306); and David Bronstein's book on the great Zurich tournament of 1953, imaginatively called Zurich 1953. That lot should keep me going for a year or two. We will return in 2007. (Joke - we will return next week, when we will assess my hapless opening technique.)