The title comes from the motto of an elite British military unit.  The parallel with chess is that in order to succeed it is often necessary to take risk.  In chess risk is associated most commonly with attacking.

Mr. D’Costa explains that one of his students suggested “just throw your pawns at them or something” when asked what happens should players castle on opposite sides.  From that the author felt motivated to write a book about attacking schemes when the sides have castled to different flanks.  Who Dares Wins! is the result.

Opposite wing attacks is certainly not a recent phenomena; I knew about it from playing either side of the Sicilian when I found some words from Reuben Fine on the subject.  Still, I doubt very much that players before Steinitz or Lasker had any great interest in it as allowing the opponent's king to castle was just bad taste!

Work on this subject has been more in the form of common medicine, such as “every tempo matters” or “ the exchange sac on c3 is necessary”.  D’Costa takes a more sophisticated approach to the subject, dividing the material into chapters based on themes.

For example “The Battering Ram” chapter deals with simple pawn charges to open lines against the opponents king.  The chapter is further subdivided according to certain aspects of the defensive formation.  There is a chapter on defending, a much maligned subject generally, that offers advice about keeping the formation tight as well as the psychological aspect of defending.

D’Costa annotates 64 games to illustrate the points.  I liked most of the annotations as they went a step beyond the simple idea of counting a race.  How moves that are aimed at a positional concern can be converted into use for attacking purposes is a big thing in these types of positions and the author does a good job of explaining this.

Game 64 between GM Adams and Woodward is a good example: the move 23.f4! seeks to keep control of e5 and is later used to support a pawn lever.

I liked the annotations and the overall concept, still I felt the book wasn’t quite enough.  Yes, when the players have castled on opposite wing we would expect flank attacks to decide the game.  Yet, flank attacks aren’t always the deciding factor.  When should they be?

As I said, there is a lot to like about this book and I would recommend it to students under 2000.

From the Publisher's website:

• Lorin D'Costa is an International Master, with one Grandmaster norm, and is one of the most rapidly improving players in the UK.  In this book, D'Costa presents a comprehensive study of opposite-side castling and the crucial techniques needed both in attack and defence.  He tackles all the key subjects, including sacrificing, speed of attack, strong and weak defensive formations, when to delay or avoid castling, and much more.  Studying this book will allow you to approach these frequent situations with confidence.

• Download paper book sample (pdf)

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