With 36 competitors and 326 games played, Ostende 1906 was one of the biggest chess tournaments of all time. Only Lasker and Tarrasch opted not to play, making it also an immensely powerful event that saw the introduction of several new young players on to the international scene. The story of this organisationally complicated and controversial event is told elsewhere in this book and so need not be repeated here. However, I believe it is worth repeating a view I have expressed previously, that great games and theoretically important games often disappear for lack of a tournament book. It is a great shame that this tournament has had to wait for nearly a hundred years for the chess world to do it justice.
This book contains not only all of the available games from the tournament but also annotations by many of the great players of the day. Their verbatim reproduction will, I hope, enable the reader to re-enter that period when the open games of the nineteenth century were giving way to the closed openings of the twentieth.
For those who are interested, there may still be a game or two to be found in the chess columns of the Russian, Polish, German and Italian press.
