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Chessville
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Play 1…b6 A Dynamic and Hypermodern Opening System for Black Reviewed by S. Evan Kreider, June 2006
Table of contents, please!!!
I can hardly believe my eyes! An Everyman Chess opening book with an index of variations! Halleluiah!!! It’s about time – perhaps someone at Everyman has heard my constant griping about the lack of such an index of most of their books . . . Even more importantly, what we have here is a very thorough and instructive work. The text is filled with both concrete variations and verbal explanations of the ideas behind the moves. However, the explanations tend to be specific to the particular move being played. There isn’t a lot of discussion of long-term or overall plans, strategies, etc. Thus, this book would be of the most use to readers who already have a good general understanding of hypermodern opening strategy, perhaps from having already played other hypermodern openings such as the Pirc, Gruenfeld, or King’s Indian Defense. As long as readers bring this kind of basic, general understanding with them, this book could be useful to players of a wide variety of strengths, perhaps even as low as mid-class C, and as far up as, well, pretty much all the way up. Readers of my other reviews might surmise that I’m not generally a fan of the example games format of opening books which is typical of Everyman. In this case, however, I think it works well. 1…b6 is not the sort of opening one takes up with the idea of learning too many concrete variations, so I think a collection of annotated games, just as we have here, is the way to go. Moreover, I’m particularly impressed with how objective the author is in his annotations. It can be very easy for authors of books on offbeat opening to get carried away, claiming advantage or equality where none exists. GM Bauer avoids this trap, letting the reader know that there are definitely times when 1…b6 will fail to equalize fully, especially against 1.e4. However, as he points out, part of the point of playing an offbeat opening such as 1…b6 is to know it better than one’s opponent, which tends to result in good practical chances. Potential buyers should be warned: this is not a repertoire book, as the table of contents above shows. GM Bauer does not indicate how to use 1…b6 against moves other than 1.e4, 1.d4, 1.c4, and 1.Nf3, other than mentioning that it is playable against most anything except 1.g3 (since 1.g3 b6 2.Bg2 is awkward for Black). That being said, after reading the rest of the book Black could probably play 1…b6 and just fake it against anything else, and even against 1.g3 (or 1.g4, for that matter) and 2.Bg2, Black might bite the bullet and try something like 2…Nc6 (we see similar lines, with colors reversed, in the English.)
GM Bauer has produced a solid first work for Everyman, and one I can
definitely recommend to those looking for something off the beaten path.
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