One player stated he had several books in descriptive notation, but they were "just for decoration" and he would not even make an attempt to read them. I did admire him for giving an honest explanation for not bothering with them...he said he was lazy.
Algebraic is easier and more more logical. Even back in the day when everybody used descriptive notation to record their games it was unusual to find a scoresheet that was without errors...ambiguous moves mostly. I do remember reading that Larry Evans was an exception.
There are a lot of great books that that are available in descriptive notation only and many players will never read them because they are not available in algebraic.
It's my contention that even if you are of slightly below average intelligence you can learn descriptive notation in ten minutes. You can learn it in the Wikipedia article HERE.
And then you can visit the Hathi Trust Library HERE, type what you are looking for and download what interests you.
For example, I typed in Alekhine and found his name came up in 1,108 full-text results.
One example was not a collection of his games (his name appeared in the book), but the 1958 edition of A SELECTION OF THE BEST GAMES OF VASSILY SMYSLOV WORLD CHESS CHAMPION edited by Alexander Liepnieks and Jack L. Spence. It has over a hundred of his games up to 1956, all annotated. All in descriptive notation, of course.
Typing in "Reinfeld" yielded 16,199 full-text results and "Euwe" turned up 6,355 full-text results. My point is the algebraic only crowd is missing out on a lot of entertaining and maybe even instructive material.
My country suffers from a dearth of chess books in English. In desperation, I picked up Fred Reinfeld's Improving Your Chess in a used bookstore one day, only to discover when I got home that it was written in descriptive notation. It's not so much that the notation system is difficult to understand; rather, it's difficult to follow without mixing up whose turn it is. My preference in my own writing is to record games and theoretical lines in natural prose, like live sports commentary. It makes for more engaging reading, and when the reading is more engaging I think it makes it easier to commit games and lines to memory.
ReplyDelete