Three Days with Bobby Fischer and Other Chess Essays: How to Meet Champions & Choose Your Openings is a chess book you can sit back comfortably in your armchair and just read. Or, when you feel like getting the pieces out of the box and learning from some great games, tactics and strategiesthat's all here as well. Nearly everyone with an interest in chess shares the same two questions:

• What were the great champions like?
• How can I choose opening moves that give me a good game?

Chess Hall-of-Famer and three-time US Champion Lev Alburt teams up with World Chess Hall of Fame Executive Director and Chess Journalist of the Year Award winner Al Lawrence to answer these questions and tell the intriguing, inspiring and sometimes downright bizarre behind-the-scenes stories of the chess greats and near-greats, and how, above all else, they were men of their times.

• Steinitz, who codified the rules of good playbefore going berserk
• Lasker, the chessboard Freudian who wielded psychological weapons
• Capablanca, dashingly handsome and to whom everything came easy
• Alekhine, a dsiplaced person who gave up drink to win
• Under-rated Euwe, the last amateur to become world champion
• Botvinnik, who refrained from sex to preserve his phosphorus
• Smyslov, an amateur opera singer who brought chess and artist' touch
• Tal, whose gaze and red-hot sacrifices wilted even the toughest wills
• Petrosian, who through chess became a paradoxa Soviet bourgeois
• Spassky, irreverent attacker who bowed to enigmatic Bobby Fischer
• Karpov, the positional boa constrictor of the board
• Kasparov, the char8smatic boxer-chess-player who's still at the top.

And many more great players of the past and present who never made it to the very top, but nevertheless left their indelible mark on the game.