My grandmaster colleague James Plaskett has two passions, the pursuit of the mythical giant octopus (ongoing) and a fascination with coincidence. Is the latter just a concatenation of unrelated circumstances, or does it have some deeper meaning, signifying something in the air at a particular time? How, for example, does one explain the virtually simultaneous, yet certainly isolated, discovery of the calculus by Newton in England, Leibnitz in Germany and Kowa Seki in Japan?
So Plaskett would, I am sure, be intrigued by the coincidental publication by two quite different publishing houses, of two books, both by American authors, about simplification, liquidation and the exchange of pieces? Not a subject of great moment, you might be forgiven for thinking — yet on closer inspection it proves a fascinating and fertile field for study.
Your Kingdom for my Horse: When to Exchange in Chess by Andrew Soltis is published by Batsford, while Liquidation on the Chessboard: Mastering the Transition into the Pawn Endgame, by Joel Benjamin, is published by New in Chess.
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