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The appeal of the Modern boils down to practicality. In the first place 1... g6 is viable against any first move by White. This "universality" decreases the number of lines a player needs to work on. The greatest strength of the Modern is its flexibility. The "exotic" feature that has attracted some players to 1...g6 is that the strategic goals of the opening can be achieved by different means. Pressure on d4 can be increased by either e7-e5 or c7-c5, with Nc6 or Bg4 or both as well as getting a knight to f5. All of this exhibits an attitude that the defense is vigorous. That is what players see in 1...g6. There is a down side in that White has a few different ideas on how to handle the defense. Starting Out: The Modern directly touches the first and last of these points. There are 11 chapters to dole out the alternative approaches by White. Each of the chapters has an introduction to clarify some of the points of the line, then illustrative games are presented and a short summary at the end. It is important to remember that White is no more limited by any "rules" than Black, so the direction of the opening can go off into some unexpected directions. This form of "alternate direction" for White is covered quite well by the chapter format as early deviations by White get some heretofore unseen coverage. A couple of examples are in the first chapter where White's approach 1. e4 g6 2.f4!? gets some ink and the overly direct 1.e4 g6 2.h4 is presented in an introduction. This is especially good for a volume intended as a starter as it helps players new to the defense keep a comfort level when the White player immediately tries to reverse the psychology by shooting out 2.h4!? Obviously it would be a titanic struggle to get every possible move order out of the way, yet Davies has gone to some lengths to get the more likely ones into the pages of this book. One chapter that is a pleasure to see is the "Lesser Averbakh" coverage 1.d4 g6 2.c4 Bg7 3.Nf3 d6 4.Nc3 where White keeps the e-pawn back a bit. This is quite an underrated line and definitely uses its own chapter. Each White system is presented with clarity in terms of White's basic aim and Black response in each case is designed to show how to deal with those aims. The writing is uncomplicated, while at the same time on target. This helps lessen the complexities of the play. Nigel Davies is a GM, a regular practitioner of 1..g6 and a prolific author. These three elements work well in the book as the direction of the opening is explained in clear direct terms. This makes the book very easy to follow and quite interesting. There are 58 illustrative games of which Davies plays Black in 26. Nearly half the games have a GM exposing his thoughts during games, how valuable can that be? Extremely! A large part of the appeal of this book is the personal observations that GM Davies shares with the reader. This will make it more palatable by a newbie to the opening. I have only one problem with the book. As I noted a large part of the appeal of the Modern is its flexibility. The book offers few alternate lines or points of different approach. An example is the Main Averbakh 1.d4 g6 2.c4 Bg7 3.e4 d6 4.Nc3 where Davies uses 4...a6!? as his approach. This was new to me, but the opening seemed to divert into a form of the Byrne line of the Samisch Kings Indian. It isn't a bad line, but what happened to the weak d4 point that had lost all of its pawn support? Isn't that possibly as important as the b5 push? This type of thing struck me as a bit narrow, but to be fair it is a book for players fresh to the Modern.
I
would recommend this book to a player of any strength or experience with the
Modern. GM Davies has includes more than enough material in the form of new
or altered ideas to make this a worthwhile pickup for the hardened player of
1...g6. His approach to the Austrian is extremely interesting because it is
based on an idea that was quite popular with Modern players, but with a
peculiar move order. Such is the thinking of the Modern player. Visit GM Davies' column here at Chessville, and also his TigerChess site:
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