Publisher: Chess Stars, 2013, Pages: 206, Paperback
"Volume 1: The Complete Queen’s Gambit"
Sooner or later every chess player faces the problem of building his or her opening repertoire. This is particularly difficult when you play with White, since you need to be well prepared against all of Black’s possible responses. However, most players, including the author, have no inclination to devote all their time to studying opening variations.
Therefore, we have decided not to cover the favourite opening move of Ostap Bender * – 1.e2-e4. As our main opening weapon for White we have chosen the closed openings arising after 1.d2-d4, in which an understanding of chess and a knowledge of the typical resources in the middle game and the endgame are often much more important than a detailed knowledge
of a large number of variations. We have analysed the most straightforward possibilities for White, generally based on the development of the knight to c3 and the fastest possible occupation of the centre with pawns.
Unfortunately it is impossible to cover all the possible theory after 1.d2-d4 for White within a single book, so the author plans to publish two further volumes.
The first book is devoted to the move 1...d7-d5 for Black. I believe that the most challenging defences for White to face are the Queen’s Gambit Accepted (Part 2), the Queen’s Gambit Declined (Part 4) and the Slav Defence (Part 5). A few less popular options for Black are covered in Parts 1 and 3.
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* Ostap Bender is the picaresque hero of the hugely popular Russian comic novel “The Twelve hairs” (1928) by Ilf and Petrov. It is still not widely known in the West, despite the efforts of, for instance, Mel Brooks, who made a film adaptation of it in 1970.
In the second book we shall deal with the openings in which Black fianchettoes his dark-squared bishop. These are first and foremost the Gruenfeld and the King’s Indian Defence.
In book three we shall analyse in detail the Nimzo-Indian Defence and a few other defences not covered in our first two books.
This series has been written for players of all levels. The author hopes that it will be useful for grandmasters as well as for amateur players.
The author wishes to express his deepest gratitude to Margarita Schepetkova and Ekaterina Smirnova for their invaluable help in the creation of this book.
Alexei Kornev
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