Author's preface: ''I have played a huge amount of tournament and match games during my long chess career, roughly 2,500 altogether. From those games, I have selected only three hundred for this book, - the games I consider my best and most instructive ones.
My goal was to represent my most valuable creative achievements of the thirty years that have passed, from 1966 till 1996. The selection was subordinated to the following three criteria: strong opponent, tense fight, and instructive value. Therefore this collection of games can be treated also as a modern chess instruction book, because the games were played mainly in the strongest events of the last thirty years.
Under such a strict selection procedure, many interesting and instructive games as well as simply beautiful fragments would have inevitably been missing in this book, if the games had been included into it only entirely. Therefore, the final chapter contains a number of my best combinations and finals which are essential for achieving the abovementioned goal; without them, this work would have been incomplete.
I still play a lot and still achieve tournament successes, so it would be premature to accept this book as my final account. I sincerely hope to play a number of good games in upcoming events and to raise my own account of tournament triumphs (I have over 140 of them recently - more than any player in chess history). However, so many chessfriends had expressed their desire to have this book right now that I decided to prepare this sort of an intermediate report on my 30 years in chess. Let reading this work bring you pleasure and improve your understanding of chess inner logic, depth and beauty.''
