Thursday, April 29, 2010

Elburg reviews "A Killer Chess Opening Repertoire"

Only this Monday afternoon I got hold of some copies of the revised "A Killer Chess Opening Repertoire". Since then I have been very busy and haven't really had the time to examine the book closely. My first impression is that most (possibly all) of my late corrections/additions made it to the final varsion.

Today I found the first review of the book at John Elburg's chess reviews. As expected he is quite positive. My guess is that Gambit on their info page will only quote his concluding line:
Conclusion: Impressive update!

Elburg points out that there is no bibliography and thinks this would have been useful for the reader. Well, he may be right. However, as a matter of fact I originally wrote a quite extensive bibliography but eventually decided to skip it as it would either have been somewhat misleading or would have needed a lot of comments. For instance it would have been somewhat misleading to list the large number of books that I consulted only to find out that they had nothing new to offer.

Elburg also mentions my analysis on Trygstad’s 1.d4 f5 2.Bg5 h6 3.Bh4 g5 4.e4 Rh7!? which may be the part where I did the most analytical work (or more precisely: where I had Rybka slaving for the longest time).


As a matter of fact only a tiny fraction of my analysis was actually included in the book. Initially I spent a lot of time trying to find a way to a clear advantages in the semi endgames resulting from Williams' mainlines in Dangerous Weapons: The Dutch. However, although I succeeded finding some quite promising paths, the positions remained difficult and there was a very real risk that Black would be better prepared for these positions. There were also space issues to be taken into consideration (the book's 192 A5 pages have been utilized more fully than I have ever seen in a chess opening manual). So in the end - just before the final proofs had to be sent - I retraced a few steps, searched for moves that Williams had ignored, and was happy to find a quite promising option that could be covered within the space available. Now I look forward to analytical feedback from Dutch players.

Monday, April 5, 2010

Killer Chess Opening Repertoire Available

According to Gambit Publishing's Infopages, 'A Killer Chess Opening Repertoire' is now available. I don't know why Gambit now has the copyrights to the book (the previous edition was an Cadogan/Everyman book). Although I am listed as a co-author I really was more of an editor as my instruction from Gambit was to leave the original content unchanged wherever reasonable. Summerscale was not involved in the update; I don't know why and presume he must be busy with other matters.

What I did was mainly adding recent game references and analysis wherever appropriate. However, this in turned forced a considerable restructuring of the book, as some of the notes were already overly long. I believe this was a fortunate necessity as it made the book a more comfortable read. Now the book is 192 A5 pages - an increase of 48 pages or roughly a third of the original 1998 version. I didn't do a lot of independent analysis but I did spend a lot of hours together with Rybka on a few critical lines.

Now I am quite eager to get my hands on a copy - not least because of the cover artwork which looks great from the web images. Unfortunately, I fear my copies will take some time to arrive as deliveries to Norway have taken surprisingly long time lately.

Note
This entry was updated on April 8th, 2010. My apologies for making at least one of the comments below looking a little strange.