Rating: 
Summary: Instructive and inspirational
Review: AK wins with his usual smooth winning technique, and this book dissects Karpov's style for the reader to have a very good "feel" for Karpov's staggering style.
Rating: 
Summary: I didn't know Karpov this way
Review: Before reading this book I thought Karpov was a kind of "Chess Beast". But now I know he became great 'cause of his patience and ability to read correctly the position without taking unnecessary risks. I was astonished to see the number of games he won in quite balanced positions because his adversaries were not able to keep the balance and let the draw run away.
The comments of Mr.Mednis are generous and easy to grasp.
Rating:
Summary: I didn't know Karpov this way
Review: Before reading this book I thought Karpov was a kind of "Chess Beast". But now I know he became great 'cause of his patience and ability to read correctly the position without taking unnecessary risks. I was astonished to see the number of games he won in quite balanced positions because his adversaries were not able to keep the balance and let the draw run away.
The comments of Mr.Mednis are generous and easy to grasp.
Rating:
Summary: Karpov is Dissected with this book
Review: Full Packed book on Karpov! It has statistics on Karpov's chess records during the 1970's era, which includes favorite openings used, wins / losses / draws against IM's and GM's, etc.The work done by Mednis here is more for the "easy reading" type of chess player, unlike Botvinnik or Kotov's books which are jam-packed with variations and analysis and more analysis. The reader is to be entertained. Mednis often praises Karpov here when Anatoly makes those "multi-purpose" moves. Karpov has a knack of making such moves. Learn some of those tricks from this book. I am a 1800 - 2000 rated player, and regularly play in the school-university tournaments. I used the material in this book (the openings Karpov plays, the karpov Middlegame Technique, the 'How -to-win-ala-Karpov' commandments that Mednis gave) to capture the gold medal in the year-round tournament.
Rating:
Summary: Karpov is Dissected with this book
Review: Full Packed book on Karpov! It has statistics on Karpov's chess records during the 1970's era, which includes favorite openings used, wins / losses / draws against IM's and GM's, etc. The work done by Mednis here is more for the "easy reading" type of chess player, unlike Botvinnik or Kotov's books which are jam-packed with variations and analysis and more analysis. The reader is to be entertained. Mednis often praises Karpov here when Anatoly makes those "multi-purpose" moves. Karpov has a knack of making such moves. Learn some of those tricks from this book. I am a 1800 - 2000 rated player, and regularly play in the school-university tournaments. I used the material in this book (the openings Karpov plays, the karpov Middlegame Technique, the 'How -to-win-ala-Karpov' commandments that Mednis gave) to capture the gold medal in the year-round tournament.
Rating:
Summary: Kind of Boring, But Still Worth Reading
Review: I would have given this book three stars, except that it's selling for only (...) on Amazon.com, which is a pretty terrific price for a book that features 100 of Karpov's games. Unfortunately, these are not his best games; they are just his wins. And how does Karpov win? Mostly by exploiting tiny endgame advantages, often in games wherein he passed up advantageous middlegames for dead-even endings.
Although his wins are mostly pretty boring, they have considerable instructional value. Studying the games of Karpov is comparable to eating oatmeal or cream of wheat, whereas the games of Shirov and Kasparov are more comparable to steak or chocolate cake. The attacking geniuses are more fun, but, for me at least, it's easier to understand and emulate the styles of Karpov and Capablanca than that of Tal or Alekhine. Playing solid, positional chess doesn't win a lot of brilliancy prizes, but most people who sacrifice pieces and try to calculate eight moves deep just wind up looking like fools most of the time.
I give author Mednis a mixed review. He knows what's going on in the games better than most of his readers, but as Grandmasters go, he's not much of a tactician. Besides missing a lot of tactics, he has an annoying habit of calling a move "the losing move" that is anything but that. For example, in a game between Karpov and Spassky that went 1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 g6, Mednis calls Black's second move the losing move simply because the King's Indian isn't part of Spassky's normal repertoire. But half the fun of this book is finding baloney like that, so despite what I just said, I strongly recommend the book anyway.
Rating:
Summary: Breaks down the elements of Karpov's style.
Review: I'm a mixed fan of Mednis (I don't like his repertoire books, like "From the opening to the endgame," but his endgame books are superb), but this is an exceptional book. He breaks down the elements of Karpov's style both statistically and analytically, and does a good job of showing Karpov's approach to the game. Karpov's style may not appeal to everyone (not terribly exciting), but he always plays to win and is notoriously difficult to beat. Mednis shows the openings he plays, the middlegames he prefers, and his preference for clear endgames over advantageous middlegames. Most useful for ELO 1600+ players.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent annotated collection of Karpov's games.
Review: Mednis' books are usually pretty good, and this is one of his best. The annotations are insightful with regard to Karpov's style of play, and instructive to the intermediate player. Descriptive notation. Typical Dover high quality paperback. Probably one of my top 10 "desert island" books.
Rating: 
Summary: Should be called "how karpov won"
Review: The main problem with this book is that though it was published in 1994 it is actually a re-print of a book from the early 80's and all the games are from the 70's - to my opinion Karpov's most boring period. The notations are not algebric and the fonts look very bad. This is not a book it is a time machine that will take you 20 years back.
Rating:
Summary: A Great book!!
Review: This book is a must have for EVERY chessplayer.This book is very instructive.You will learn a lot from this book about chess strategy and positional play.The author Edmar Mednis once a strong chessplayer and with a victory against Bobby Fischer himself has done a great job on explaining the way Karpov plays. If you want to understand Karpovs game you cant be without this book.Many people rate books with 5 points without hesitation but this book is a REAL 5 pointer.I have many chessbooks and this one is on the absolute top.It's just fantastic to see Karpov slowly squeeze and finally destroy his helpless opponents.
To me it looks like an anacondas victory over his helpless victims.The opponents often get desperat. The author annotates with many words.You will get very much from every game.You can use the knowledge you get from this book on your opponents! SPECIALLY RECOMMENDED Buy it now !!
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