Everyone who takes chess seriously knows the games of Mihail Tal, Boris Spassky, Tigran Petrosian and Viktor Korchnoi. But they know very little about their private lives. This is remarkable because their life stories are much more dramatic, heart-rending, even terryfying than those of today's elite players. (...)

Some of the most important events in the lives of these four men have been ignored completely by respected sources.

This book describes the intense rivalry and collaboration of the four players who created the golden era when USSR players dominated the world. It includes annotated games and personal details, many revealed for the first time in English, of: Mikhail Tal, the roguish, doomed Latvian who changed the way chess players think about attack and sacrifice; Tigran Petrosian, the brilliant, henpecked Armenian whose wife drove him to become the world's best player; Boris Spassky, the prodigy who survived near-starvation and later bouts of melancholia to succeed Petrosian-but is best remembered for losing to Bobby Fischer; and Viktor Korchnoi, the "Evil Viktor" whose mixture of genius and jealousy helped him eventually surpass his three rivals. But fate denied him the title they achieved, world champion.