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Book review, © Copyright 2002, Jim Loy
This may be the best chess book ever. Let me rephrase that. This is the best chess book ever. It is truly amazing. It is thought provoking, even disturbing. It essentially says that everything you know is wrong, almost. While reading this, you will begin to understand chess much more deeply than you ever did before, and you may despair of ever understanding chess at all. It will shake your strongly held beliefs. What beliefs are those? Knights before bishops, castle early, don't make too many pawn moves, don't move pawns in front of your king, a backward pawn on an open file is weak, don't move the same piece twice in the opening, always have a long range plan, and a dozen other rules. These dogmatic ideas dominated the past, and continue to dominate our beginner instruction. And they are all false. False. We probably need to grow up thinking they are true, but when you become a relatively strong player, you will see more and more exceptions, until you will see (with the help of this book and/or countless grandmaster games) that dogmatism is dead. Pragmatism, examining each position as its own universe with its own rules, is the game of chess today. Game after game after game, the rules go by the wayside. You may be skeptical, but deep down you know that it's true. Knights before bishops? Some of your favorite variations violate that rule. It was never a real rule. In some positions, bishops before knights work better. You knew that. You knew of variations where a backward pawn was just fine. And you have moved your pawns from in front of your king, because the top grandmasters do the same thing in the same position. They castle and then move g4 with every intention of seizing a space advantage. You knew you could get away with this or that, because the opening books gave it an = or better, or because you've played that position many times and you get good positions from it. Buy this book, and read it more than once.
When I bought Watson's book, I also bought Hans Berliner's The System. Berliner is former World Correspondence Chess Champ, and a pioneer in computer chess and artificial intelligence. This book is extreme dogmatism, from beginning to end. Don't get me wrong, it is an interesting and thought provoking book. But, it is difficult to take it seriously. We find that 1e4 cannot be correct; 1d4 is the only correct move. We find that the Slav Defense is a near loss, as are the Grunfeld Defense, the Queen's Gambit Declined, the Benko Gambit, and the Modern Benoni. In particular, 1 d4 d5 2 c4 e6 3 Nc3 Nf6 4 cxd5 exd5 5 Bg5 is a near win for White. In general, one move, and only one move, is correct in any position. Just what is this system which dictates one move in each position? It includes the standard ideas of material and tactics, board control, and development. But it also stars the option principle: "Make the move (develop the piece) that does the least to reduce your options to make other important moves." And there are other interesting and good principles. This seems to be a good book, if read with a huge amount of skepticism.
To order Secrets of Modern Chess Strategy - by John Watson, click Amazon.com (goes directly to the book).