Wojo's Weapons: Winning With White, Volume 1

Publisher: Mongoose Press, 2009, Pages: 408, Paperback

The late Aleksander Wojtkiewicz – known as “Wojo” to his fans and followers – was one of the most feared players of the White pieces in the U.S. tournament circuit. Using his dynamic, Catalan-based opening repertoire, the “Polish Magician” won hundreds of tournaments from the 1990’s until his untimely death in 2006. Now, Wojtkiewicz experts IM Dean Ippolito and NM Jonathan Hilton have joined forces to produce the definitive “how-to” manual for learning Wojo’s repertoire with White after 1.Nf3 d5. Over the course of 75 fully annotated games – 40 of which were played by Wojo himself – the authors make Wojtkiewicz’s strategies easily accessible to the chess public for the first time.

Wojo’s Weapons has plenty to offer chessplayers of all strengths:

    * Club players looking to master an efficient, safe, and practical White repertoire will benefit from this highly readable book. The authors give full verbal explanations of each key idea, and brief recaps are provided at the end of annotated games.
    * Titled players will find full, up-to-date theoretical coverage of all the lines presented. The book is packed with the authors’ own novelties and little-known ideas, and analysis of the Catalan given by GM Boris Avrukh in 1.d4 is updated and improved.
    * Finally, experts looking to achieve the master title will benefit most from the thorough explanations of middlegame and endgame ideas provided in the annotated games themselves. If you are looking to attain the level of positional maturity needed to become a titled player, this book is for you.


Wojo’s Weapons is arranged so that ideas learned in the first chapters can be applied to your own tournament practice right away – so if you think you’re ready to start winning the Wojo way, there is no longer anything stopping you. This book is your tool to building a world-class repertoire and to achieving positional mastery.

About the Authors

International Master Dean Ippolito is a 10-time All-America Team member and has won 13 national championship titles, including that of 1996 National High School Champion. He has more than twenty years’ experience playing most of Wojtkiewicz’s systems from the White side. The author of two other books, Dean operates a successful chess teaching company, Dean Ippolito, LLC, in New Jersey, helping his students to win 15 national titles. He is currently working to earn the title of Grandmaster.

National Master Jonathan Hilton is an award-winning freelance journalist and the author of over one hundred published articles on chess. He has a passion for Wojtkiewicz’s playing style and has relied on the Polish-American star’s repertoire with the White pieces for the better part of a decade. His acclaimed six-part “How Wojo Won” series, which premiered on Chess Life Online in 2006, was touted for its accessibility to club players. This is his first book for Mongoose Press. He is currently attending the University of Cincinnati.