Annotated Games from Masters of Strategy

I am looking for recommendations for books with annotated games by some of the world champions, namely: Lasker, Botvinnik, Petrosian, and Karpov.  Ideally the games will have very detailed annotations , even more ideally by the player themselves.  Suggestions of other players with similar sound style are also appreciated.  I am not supposed to look at players like Tal or Kasparov at this point in time.

There are a couple books recently out about Botvinnik's chess championships with his notes.. I have the one vs Smyslov which I like.

I think most of the world championships must have books out by now.  If those are well written it would probably make for some good reading although perhaps a compilation of a player would have more games than the 24.

One bump to see if anyone else out there has any suggestions

David Bronstein's 1953 Zurich Candidates tournament book can be purchased cheaply. It's Bronstein's attempt to write a textbook on the middlegame in the  annotations to a large super high quality tournament. So these aren't all World Champion games, but these are all players competing for the opportunity to play a match against WC Botvinnik. There is one past world champ (Euwe) two future world champs in the mix: Smyslov and Petrosian, and three of the strongest players ever to not win the World Championship: Bronstein Keres and Reshevsky. The rest of the field are no slouches either. It's a pretty amazing bit of work. It's a great look at mid-century (mostly soviet) chess. And I repeat, Bronstein annotated with the purpose of writing a text book, the text is generous!

The Mammoth Book of Games is just a great big collection of great games spanning chess history. Plenty of world champion games in there.

The obvious obvious obvious collection for you to look at is: On my great predecessors by Kasparov. vols I-V... just pick up 1, Steinity Lasker Capablanca Alekhine and keep going.

If you want something great but more bite-size... I heartily recommend Modern Ideas in chess, by Reti. It's not exactly you asked for really, but its a very high quality collection imo.

Thanks, I've seen the Kasparov collection in a few book stores but I hadn't looked at in any depth.  But I'll definitely ask around about that series.  The 1953 Zurich sounds very good as well.

here are some i've posted for fun:

http://www.chess.com/forum/view/game-showcase/famous-games

http://www.chess.com/forum/view/game-showcase/famous-games-part-2

http://www.chess.com/forum/view/game-showcase/famous-games-3

http://www.chess.com/forum/view/game-showcase/famous-games-4

http://www.chess.com/forum/view/game-showcase/famous-games-5

*edit*

I realize i didn't read your OP carefully enough, the point wasn't so much to find games by World Champions as by sound positional type players (who are world champions...) rather than attacking masters like Tal and Kasparov. You would probably find this collection useful:

Masters of Strategy

Botvinnik 100 Selected games (annotated by Botvinnik) is also excellent.

Yeah that does look like a nice set as well.  Choices choices

Try to find an old copy of "How Karpov Wins."  That was the best annotated collection I ever found that had a very clear, unified, strategic theme.  Specifically, how Karpov approached the opening and middle game with an eye toward achieving a simple, won endgame.

I have 2 nice books of Spassky's games and find I enjoy his games very much. I dont know why he receives so little recognition. He was clearly the best player in the world for several years....

Spassky was like Fischer in that he was a superb challenger. I remember those years--at least reading about them as recent history before Fischer beat him for the title.

A lazy Russian bear, he was called, and predicted that he would hold the title for just one cycle.

I guess it's that he didn't dominate while WC that "shortens" the memories of the casual fan. As I recall he finished in 6th in the Alekhine Memorial while WC.

A poor performance for a WC.

Anyway, he genuinely was great. Maybe he just enjoyed the non-chess parts of life too much.

 written by whom and what was it called ?

 Spassky's 100 Best Games - Bernard Cafferty ( 1972 )  and

Boris Spassky's 300 Wins - a Chess Stars publication ( 1998 )

My coach, he says Tal was too wild.  I need to understand sound strategy first

Thanks, I got some games by Petrosian to start with.  Although going by Chessbase Alex Chernin and Oleg Romanishin might be the best models based on what I try to play