|
||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||
|
Chessville
Chess
Place Your Ad Advertise to Single insert:
|
Starting Out: The English Reviewed by Rick Kennedy
As a life-long 1.e4 player and frequent 1.d4 player (although I always considered the Blackmar Diemer Gambit to be kind of an e4 opening) I figured if Neil McDonald could make the English Opening, 1.c4, make sense to me -- better yet, make it attractive -- that would be enough for me to recommend it highly. Make no mistake: I recommend it highly. McDonald even succeeds in making the supposedly stodgy English look sexy:
First off, the book is hefty. Not that size is everything, but it weighs in at approaching 200 pages (Everyman lists it as 160 pages, but it's more like 190) which is good for an introduction. As McDonald writes:
The contents include:
Secondly, the layout of the book, and of each chapter, is well-suited for introducing and explaining this sometimes chameleon-like opening. McDonald uses pawn structure and piece placement, as well as thematic plans, to organize his material. He then presents it in chapters which are paced for those who play chess, but who are “starting out” with the English. As an example, let me walk through Chapter Six, The Reversed Dragon. First (as in all the chapters) there is an Introduction, which is further broken down into Theoretical? and Strategies. For this chapter, the Theoretical? says:
Strategies has the line 1.c4 e5 2.Nc3 Nf6 3.Nf3 Nc6 4.g3 d5 5.cd Nxd5 6.Bg2 Nb6
...followed by two diagrams and about a page of explanation. There follows three text sections: The Vulnerable Knight on c6, White’s Queenside Pressure, and Black’s Counterplay; the last of which, in its 8 pages, has 4 annotated games. Sprinkled throughout the book are commentaries in bold, marked by a graphic of a light bulb (a Tip), a clipboard (a Note) or a skull-and-crossbones (a Warning). Some are specific to the position being discussed, while some are generally applicable. For example, a Warning in Chapter Six, The Reversed Dragon shows up in the notes to Bacrot – Topalov, Dubai 2002:
A little later on in the game, a Note appears:
Another nice touch is that each diagram has a short, punchy caption. Those in this chapter read: in the Introduction -“Black has more space,” “The Dragon Reversed,” in Black’s Counterplay, Karpov – Hjartarson Seattle 1989- “Black weakens c6,” “White dominates, ” in Suba – Garcia, Malaga 2001- “How to defend b7?” “Whoops!” in Kasparov – Salov Moscow 1988- “White has Bishop v. Knight,” “a7 and b6 are weak,” and in Bacrot – Topalov, Dubai 2002- “White’s first mistake” and “White is punished.” Some of the 52 annotated games in Starting Out: The English are as recent as 2002. The Bibliography includes ten print sources, the most recent being Tony Kosten’s The Dynamic English (Gambit 1999), but also referred to are the Informants, the internet-based “The Week in Chess,” and Kosten’s English Opening pages on the Chesspublishing.com website. For club players from advanced beginner
through Expert who want to learn to play 1.c4, McDonald’s book will be just
what they need, “whether trying out the English Opening as White or beating
it with Black” as the author notes. From there, players can move on to
deeper coverage of the opening, say the aforementioned repertoire book by
Kosten, David Cummings’ Symmetrical English (Everyman Chess 2001), or
Carsten Hansen’s The Gambit Guide To The English Opening 1...e5
(Gambit 1999 ) and The Symmetrical English (Gambit 2000) – but they
may be surprised by how much mileage they get out of Starting Out: The
English before they need to do so.
|
The Chessville
The
|
||||||||||
|
||||||||||||
