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Twenty years later I wondered if I could still play the Marshall, with a large doubt in my stomach. After all, consider the amount of material available, the number of players producing ideas along with the speed of transmission of those ideas and the fact that the Marshall has been played at the top levels for most of those years. Didn’t seem likely. Well, David Vigorito’s “Understanding the Marshall Attack” has quelled my doubts. The first thing I liked about Vigorito’s approach is the layout of the book. It consists of three parts, a small point that helped me to get a better grip on the material.
Material in Part 2 is concerned with offshoots between move 12 and 14 for White such as 12.d3, 12.g3, or 12.Bxd5. These lines have mostly been secondary tries, though Fischer advocated 12.g3 for a while. Of all the lines that occur in Part 2 12.d3 Bd6 13.Re1 Qh4 14.g3 Qh3 15.Re4 is the most surprising, the idea is quite interesting and has turned out to be more difficult for Black than might be expected. The evaluations of these lines is that Black is doing fine, though again with a deeper analytic tree. Part 3 covers the Anti-Marshall lines. This is an especially valuable point to someone like me who might be returning to the Marshall. 8.a4 was the only “Anti-Marshall” for at least 2 generations, yet now 8.h3 and even 8.d4 are proving to be areas necessary for some understanding. At first this seemed like an overwhelming amount of material to get through, but the layout helped me a lot. The author has done an outstanding job of researching the material for this book. This is the third volume to cover the Marshall which I have seen this year. Understanding the Marshall Attack tends towards more of a compendium than the others and provides enough material in all the lines to qualify. Vigorito goes as far as to recommend a sequence of chapters to read from the introduction. Also, I noted that each page had at least two diagrams. Normally I would skeptically suggest this was to fill pages, but in this case it eases the reader's mind as to the position under investigation and relieves some possible tension. The only caveat I can offer for this book is that it does require the reader to play the Marshall. I know that is kind of an obvious statement, but remember that a lot of the lines peter out to equal endings. You just need to know that and be happy with it before going in.
With
my doubts allayed I am ready to try the Marshall again! From the Publisher's website:
Other titles by David Vigorito reviewed at Chessville: Play the Semi-Slav by David Vigorito (Quality Chess, 2008), reviewed by Michael Jeffreys
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