John Donaldson: The Life and Games of Frank Anderson

Moravian Chess, hardcover, Englisch, ISBN: 978-80-7189-608-1, 361 Seiten, 2009.

The Life and Games of Frank Anderson
You get the Good, the Bad and the Ugly

From the Foreword by John Donaldson:

"The origins of the work before you depended heavily on serendipity. Ten years ago, while visiting Los Angeles, I bought a book on a Russian championship published in Dutch, at a used book store.

Examining it later at my friend Jeremy Silmans home, I noticed that it had been previously owned by Frank Anderson of Toronto and mentioned this to Jeremy.

He thought it was funny because as a teenager growing up in San Diego in the early 1970s he had gone to a few meetings for the strongest players in San Diego.

The meetings were hosted by a Frank Anderson who Jeremy remembered as being a strong player and very supportive. Surely they could not be the same player, could they?

A few weeks later after doing some research I discovered they were, and that the previous owner of my book was not just any old player.

He was an International Master who had twice turned in the highest percentage in Olympiads on board two and had won a pair of Canadian Championship titles.

A little bit more digging revealed that Anderson only started playing in his late teens after battling back from a serious illness that left him bed-ridden for over half a decade.(..)

Anderson played only a handful of tournaments in the United States but with a uniformly high rate of success. (..) Probably the greatest mystery in Anderson's career is his performance at the Munich Olympiad in 1958.

There he had the best percentage score on board two and legend has it was cheated out of the Grandmaster title. The reader will find a detailed examination of the evidence as to what really happened.

I have tried as much as possible to let Anderson tell his own story through his writing whether it be annotations to his games or articles he wrote. This has been supplemented by material from magazines of the time, particularly Canadian Chess Chat, Chess Life and Chess Review.

Finally the author, aided by his tireless friends Fritz 11 and Rybka 2.3, has stepped in when needed to provide commentary.

This is not a "best games" book. You get the good, the bad and the ugly. Fortunately Anderson was not a beginner for very long and just a few years after starting to play was a Master.

California, 2009