Improve Your Opening Play

Rating:
Summary: This is the perfect book to BEGIN opening study
Review: I am writing this review of Improve Your Opening Play because the other reviews leave a gap or two in explanation. In sum, this book is perfect for the absolute OPENING beginner -- and I don't mean CHESS beginner.

If you're an opening beginner, when you go to the bookstore and see the various titles on openings, you may wonder, "What's the use of learning the Najdorf Variation of the Sicilian when my father's never gonna let me get more than 2 moves into it?"

This book is for you. There are way too few books like Improve Your Opening Play, which accomodates the multitude of players who need to know the opening fundamentals before proceeding on to the much more detailed books on the market.

Reuben Fine's book on the ideas behind the openings, of course, is also a good place to start, but this book is more up-to-date, a little "shorter and sweeter," very well organized, and presents its lessons in a visually simple and effective manner. The IDEAS underlying each move of every opening you are likely to see (an average of 6 to 8 moves out) are thoughtfully presented. The discussion also includes analysis of common variants to many of the more classic moves.

In my opinion, GM Chris Ward, gives just the right amount of information to the new student of the openings, making opening study fun rather than overwhelming, and providing a solid foundation for more advanced study of any opening you may want to pursue. If you thoroughly study this book, when you see a particular opening in play, you will have a grasp of what you should be striving for as well as what your opponent is trying to do, and I, for one, have always felt that the THINKING in chess is what makes this great game fun -- not the memorization.

Rating:
Summary: A systematic, easy to understand approach to openings
Review: I have read the book and it helped me a lot to improve my opening understanding. Chris has a very powerful technique for dealing with opening systems and he explains the important points very clearly, and easy to follow way. So, I recommend the book for the players who want to improve their understanding on the openings, especially Scilian and French defence. I am a 2000 rated player.

Rating:
Summary: Straightforward introduction to the ideas behind openings
Review: I like this book a lot, it is a brief synopsis of the overall idea of each of the major openings. Like a previous reviewer noted, it is strictly for beginners and will not teach you an opening. It will, however, give you the basic plan behind the opening and can be the starting point for study (after which you will want to get a dedicated opening book, most likely).

If you look at it as The Ideas Behind the Chess Openings 'lite', you will not be far off. My only major complaint with this book is coverage of the Caro-Kann compared to some other openings. It's basically nonexistant, and you are left feeling a little short changed. The coverage of the Sicilian, on the other hand, is quite good (for a book of this type) mentioning both c3 and several forms of the open (the author is a dragon expert!).

After you read this book, I think the ideas behind the chess openings should be your next book, for a little more detail, then probably choose one or two opening specific books -- the new 'Starting out' series by everyman would probably be a good choice for a novice player. As always, MCO (or NCO -- don't want to start a holy war) will be useful as reference material.

In summary, this book is very good, but is only the first step; you will not find everything you need in this book, only a very broad overview.

Rating:
Summary: Disappointed
Review: This book contains flawed analysis (on the Möller Attack and others) which is really not acceptable. The book gives a glimpse of several major openings (to its credit) but stops its analysis arbitrarily and does not really emphasise the fundamental underlying principles which it claims to do. It is patchy and not good. I feel like Chris Ward must have written this book while he was bored one day, and it took him less than an hour...

Rating:
Summary: Disappointed
Review: This book contains flawed analysis (on the Möller Attack and others) which is really not acceptable. The book gives a glimpse of several major openings (to its credit) but stops its analysis arbitrarily and does not really emphasise the fundamental underlying principles which it claims to do. It is patchy and not good. I feel like Chris Ward must have written this book while he was bored one day, and it took him less than an hour...

Rating:
Summary: A good manual, but ONLY for beginners.
Review: This is a great little book, but like so many that I see nowadays, there are certainly pros and cons to this book. (And you should know that I teach chess for a living.)

First off this is one of the newer books by "EVERYMAN Chess." This is a fairly high-quality series of books. The publisher's books have several characteristics that will stand out: The books have a very thick and sturdy "Flex-cover" binding. (If it's not a hard-back, and this one is not.) The pages are thick and high quality, with little bleed-through. These chess books also have a very sturdy binding, unlike many of the other chess books on the market today. (Read the reviews of "The Life & Games of Mikhail Tal," to see what I am talking about.) The books also must have a first rate proofreader, as I have yet to find an error in spelling, grammar, or even a diagram that has an incorrect position. (These types of errors used to plague the chess book market.) So the overall quality of the books from this publisher are generally must higher than is the average for a chess book.

Now not to argue with the other gentleman who wrote a review here, but this book has definite limitations.

First off, the basic premise of this book is brilliant. To have a GM sit down and tell you the basic ideas of an opening and lead you through a few of the pertinent variations is a wonderful idea. I am sure many beginners would think this is a very good concept. Especially helpful are the "warnings" (accompanied by a skull and crossbones) and the "tips." (Accompanied by a light bulb.) Here you do see a lot of the more useful "Do's and Don'ts" of any opening given. Chris Ward does explain the basic concepts of the openings covered.

But it stops short of being a real opening manual. The student really trying to learn any opening will still need to buy this book, maybe a "how-to" book on the opening they want to play AND MCO-14. For instance, the basic coverage of the Caro-Kann stops on the fourth move. True, he does carry on the discussion of this opening in an exercise. But still, the coverage of many of the openings discussed in this book stops around move 5-8. Another deficiency I noticed was a lot of verbiage on various topics, but no real discussion of the general middle-game plans. (For instance, in the King's Indian Defense, White plays on the Q-side and Black plays on the K-side. This is dictated by the pawn structure.)

A simple solution to this problem would have given at least the main line of each variation, stopping where the average opening compendium stops. This would have only added a few pages to this book and would have greatly enhanced the value of it.

If you are an absolute BEGINNER, or you are trying to learn an opening for the first time, I can recommend this book. But the average tournament player will still wind up buying MCO in addition to this book.