Batsford Chess Openings [antikvár]

Introduction This book was conceived to fill a gap in the extensive list of Batsford chess publications. Batsford already publish the five volume Encyclopaedia of Chess Openings, but our feeling was that both the price and the complexity of these highly specialised technical volumes were soaring beyond the reach and the needs of the average player. Accordingly, we have attempted to create a single, inexpensive volume, covering all openings to a depth that will hopefully be adequate for all social, club and county players, plus competitors in weekend tournaments. The latter may indeed perceive this lightweight compendium as a particular boon when assembling their weekend luggage. The compression required to pack coverage of all openings into some 300 pages may render our book's utility more problematic for Masters and Grandmasters on the international circuit, but we hope that the new suggestions by myself and Gary Kasparov, and our selection of material, may be helpful even for this exalted class of player. The key points of this book are as follows: • Co-operation by an expert international team from the USSR, USA and England, headed by Gary Kasparov and myself. • All openings are covered. • Ease of reference. All notes connected to the rows of main moves appear on one and the same double-spread, thus avoiding all that tedious juggling with separate pages to find the right note which one associates with so many other reference books. • Strategic introductions, ideas and historical background to each opening. • The material is very up to date. • All moves appear in FIDE-approved international figurine algebraic notation. In order to squeeze the material into a size of book which we hope will be regarded as good value, we have had to make a number of ruthless decisions to scrap or reduce coverage of lines we consider less important, and we apologise in advance if the reader finds that his favourite variation has been heavily pruned. Although Gary and I have played many openings during the course of our careers we are obviously more expert in some lines (e.g. the Queen's Indian Defence or the Modern Defence) than in others. For some topics we have had to rely more heavily on received opinion than on our own experience, but we hope that the reader will not detect significant differences in the quality of the varying modes of material. Ray Keene London, September 1982