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Starting Out: Modern Benoni Reviewed by Mike Rosensaft
Endre Vegh, an international master from Hungary, has written his first book for Everyman Chess in their very popular “Starting Out” series. The book promises that it has a “user-friendly design to help readers absorb ideas,” “concentrates on the key principles of the Modern Benoni,” and is “ideal for the improving player.” Unfortunately it fails on all three fronts. The design of the book has great aspirations to be “user-friendly.” I was very excited to see in the introduction that it begins with an illustrative game of Tal’s and then proceeds to explain the difference between the Modern Benoni and other Benoni structures. It also has a very nice section on move transpositions. In fact, one of the great strengths of this book is its many references to transpositions and references to other defenses (most notably the King’s Indian, which is a close cousin). The opening is followed by a 52-page section that details the key moves for White and for Black. Wow – 52 pages of explanations about the opening. I thought the format was perfectly balanced. What could be better for the improving player who wants to understand the defense? It was a great idea and I really wanted the format to work well, but I was unfortunately sorely disappointed. This 52-page section is just incredibly hard to follow. It is divided into key moves for White and then key moves for Black. The explanations of why the moves are key and what they achieve are usually adequate, but never more than that. The author lists the key move and then jumps quickly into an illustrative game or two. However, the games are not presented in full. This isn’t necessarily a problem, but often the diagrams showing the starting positions appear on different pages than the text explaining the diagrams. Then, sometimes up to 14 moves will be included before another diagram is shown with little commentary along the way. The author can’t seriously expect the “improving” player to keep track of all the moves in their head. To really make this format work, the author would need to add a lot more explanation after most moves, make sure the diagrams appear on the same page as the text explaining the position, and overall include more diagrams. Throughout this entire introduction I was confused a lot of the time and did not find it very user-friendly at all. When proceeding past the introduction to the explanation of each variation of the Modern Benoni, the author continues the unfortunate trend of providing lots of lines, but not much commentary. Its not that the author doesn’t provide any explanation, but the explanations provided are generally perfunctory. The author prefers to offer strings of variations and comments more about the players than the position. It would be one thing if the book was trying to be a theoretical tome on the Benoni, but it presents itself as just the opposite – as a book that beginners can use to really understand the opening. There just isn’t enough explanation to understand anything. The author’s writing is generally fluid and there are some high points. The author usually takes a very casual, friendly tone with the reader and his experience in the chess scene is noteworthy. For example, he presents one game that he describes as “a characteristic Benoni game, in which the ‘son of sorrow’ was not Black but my chess colleague who lives only 1500 metres from my flat.” (p. 72)
In this section he actually offers a lot of advice of the merits and weaknesses of this system, including what people have done to try to avoid it. But, in general, these quips are few and far between, greatly overshadowed by the plethora of variations and sub-variations presented in the games themselves. The book ends with a nice index of variations with diagrams that show how each of the variations start. This is a great idea, but doesn’t save the book overall.
The Modern Benoni is one of the more complicated openings as Black. I’ve
always considered it the most complicated answer to d4. Writing an
Opening Guide for the Modern Benoni is not an easy task. Its tactical
nature often mandates memorization of many variations and a constant guard
for tactics on both sides. Thus, I hate to be too hard on IM Vegh. I’ve
certainly seen much worse opening books, and it is clear that IM Vegh worked
very hard on this book and packed it with a lot of information. But in the
end, Starting Out: Modern Benoni just doesn’t deliver its promises: it's
far from user-friendly; hardly explains the key principles in any detail
that is really useful for the improving player; and is therefore less than
ideal for the improving player. Most of the time it is too perfunctory for
a beginner to get a lot out of the book, but probably not dense enough to be
really useful for an advanced player. In short, the book on the “son of
sorrow” is a “ton of sorrow” itself – overall probably adequate to give you
a flavor of the opening, but failing to really excel for any level of
player.
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