Customer Reviews

How to Play the English Opening (Batsford Chess Books)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

If you are interested in this book at all it is because you want to learn more about the English Chess Opening. From a white or black side.

This book is good for that purporse. It will give you good positional ideas about the English. The book contains 30 well anotated games. Karpov is sharing his knowledge about this opening to you.

Here are the drawbacks to this book.
1. It says nothing about what you should do if black plays a 1. c4 c6 (slav) or 1. c4 e6 (queens gambit). If you play the English you need to know what to do here. (probably even need to study the Dutch opening also) You will get these replies from black alot, trust me.

2. Alot of the games are 10 years old or older. Now true it seems like all the Super GMs play nothing more than Petrof, Slav, and Ruy Lopez these days. But I would of wish for some more modern games.

But if you want a good positional understanding of 1.c4 c5 or 1.c4 e5, this is a good book.

I enjoyed this book a lot, and will be reading it a second time. It gives you an insight into an opening that the author, one of the greatest chess players of all time, clearly loves deeply. I particularly enjoyed reading how this opening developed over the years that Karpov was engaged in epic battles with Kasparov. The book also provides you with a bit of a behind the scenes of how the great players prepare for combat, with dedicated researchers and similar.

Before purchasing this book though, it is important to understand what it is, and what it is not. This book is not:

1. an English opening system (like Kolsten's "Dynamic English"),
2. an upto date theoretical tomb on the English
3. a guide as to what variations to play.

This book will be of interest to players, black or white, who want to:

1. gain better understanding of the types of positions and games that specific c4 lines lead too - e.g. 1. c4 e5, 2. Nc3...
2. gain insight into the hedgehog and other symmetrical lines (that can also arise from 1. Nf3)
3. are building a classical English defence against c4 (i.e. e5 or c5)
4. would like some understanding on how great players learn by imprinting critical games in their minds
5. enjoy reading a true great of the game describe classic battles

The chess lines in this book can transpose into d4 openings. I have come to the conclusion, that the reality is, that to play chess for "an advantage" in the opening, a price to be paid is that transpositions can occur. No 1 book can cover off the English and all these transpositions, unless one is willing to compromise with a set system (e.g. Kolsten's 2. g3). Set systems can work, but are not for everyone (they can ultimately get a bit dull, at least for me).

If you want to play English lines like the four knights, or too augment a d4 repertoire with some anti-nimzo lines or similar, this book is useful, but will need to be supplemented with a more theoretical book (I have Vladimir Bagirov's books - although I guess they are probably out of date).

So with that said - I really do love this book. If you like chess, for the sake of chess, and are not looking for someone to tell you what to play, but rather to read a Grandmaster describing what he played, and the struggle over English variations during his time at the top, all you will enjoy this book a lot.

Firstly, this book is very good for both white and black. Also, this book doesn't contain any complex 20 move analysis that is hard to understand. In fact, the annotations are very good for any player, and, because of the positional nature of the English Opening, neither side really ever needs to know any lines at all. The book is more geared towards gaining an understanding of the positions, not memorizing lines. That way, when you sit down to play this opening, you don't have to be thinking 'What does the book tell me to do in this position?'. Instead, you can be able to figure it out yourself, choosing a variaty of plans shown in the book. Finally, it should be noted that this contains far more than the thirty games advertised. For every game there is usually at least one 'side game' that presents an alternative to what was played in the game. Highly recommended!

The format of the book is very much like the "Chess Explained Series" by Gambit with the only difference that Karpov has picked 30 games instead of 25 games that Gambit does. So a good book to compare it to would be Chess Explained: The English Opening, while Karpov's book is slightly superior in content it is simply atrocious when it comes to lay out, organization and design (which would explain why you can not find a few pages to preview anywhere online). Here are my major complaints:

1. The entire book is typeset with a sans-serif font (Gill Sans I believe) which makes reading it rather difficult.

2. The typos are annoying and the diagrams are too small. They have used the diagram for a two column book in a full page format so you have tiny diagrams with large chunks of blank space on either side of them.

3. The translation is extremely bad, it sounds like a literal translation by someone who has no knowledge of English chess phrases. So you get lots of clunky sentences and long wordy passages that can be easily reduced to a word or two.

4. If you are looking for something in this book you have to rely on memory because there is no index of games, players or variations, the book ends right after the 30th game! Even the table of contents is not divided according to major branches of the English opening. Here is a small attempt that may help the reader:

a) Games 1 - 15: Reversed Sicilian (1. c4 e5)
b) Games 16 - 19: Anti-NID (1. Nf3 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. Nc3) and Anti-QID (1. Nf3 Nf6 2. c4 b6 3. g3)
c) Games 20 - 22 & 28: Anti-Benoni (1. Nf3 Nf6 2. c4 c5 3. Nc3 Nc6 4. d4 cxd4 5. Nxd4)
d) Games 23 - 25 & 30: Hedgehog
e) Games 26 - 27: Double Fianchetto
f) Game 29: Asymmetrical Variation (1. c4 c5 2. Nf3 Nf6 3. Nc3 d5)

5. But the biggest problem with the book is that variations and sub-variations are not distinguished in the annotations. The game moves are in bold but there are no labels (A) or a11) or anything like that) and no other typefaces to help with the tree of variations in the text. So sometimes you start following a line without knowing where you are on the analysis tree which in practice is quite a problem. The only way to deal with this problem seems to be a heavy use of highlighters ...

To conclude, this is a great book that is ruined by the publisher, it seems nobody at Batsford Chess bothered to read a copy before sending it to the printer and the 11th world champion definitely deserves a better publisher. Despite the good content I would strongly recommend against buying this book unless a much improved (not in terms of content but in terms of design and organization) second edition appears.

While this book is not a repertoire book, it gave me (a club player with a USCF rating of 1234) a deeper understanding of the English Opening. Karpov's theory on playing openings is similar to learning a foreign language: if one immerses themselves in a particular language (or opening), one can speak (or play) it effortlessly before they know it. The 30 games in this book, some of which are played by the likes of Karpov himself, Kramnik, Anand, and Van Wely, give the reader a good understanding of the positions that frequently arise in the English and how to win with them as either Black or White.

I read this book thinking that it would give me insights of the English Opening played by White, since the title suggested it.
But to my great disapointment I saw that Karpov mostly gives games that Black won, especially his own games.
In spite of having information about various schemes with white and black, it mostly shows the black side and very few games
where the author played the English.
Much better than this book is Mihai Marin trilogy about the English, or even Watson's 3 volume in his collection of openings.

This book is basically a compilation of 30 games from 1987 on. As other reviewers had pointed out, some common responses to the English Opening were not included. So, it is obviously a supplement to one's chess library and not an encyclopedia on the English Opening.

While it is almost always fun and productive to read a super-grandmaster's thoughts on historical games, I am not particularly impressed by this volume for two reasons.

First, Karpov did not bother to check every variation within his comments. There are therefore some clearly bad moves being suggested. For examples, in the first game, on page 10, he referred to the following line as "interesting": 19...Rxe4!? 20 Bxe4 f5! 21 Bf3 Nd4 22 dxc4 Bxf3 23 exf3 e2 24 Rfe1 Qxc4. In fact, 22 Bd5! is a far better move for white. Any computer chess engine would have picked up this point had Karpov cared to check. This is not just a trivial difference of opinions because it basically invalidates the 19...Rxe4 option for black. The whole paragraph should not have been there.

Second, Karpov's narrative was aimed at documenting the evolution of what he considered the state of the art of English Opening between 1987 and 2003. While this may be of interest to chess historians, it leaves most readers unfulfilled. Common variations at the club level are not touched upon at all, and the focus is instead on subtleties at 20+ moves into the game. In short, this book is for players rated at 2000+. Mere mortals will not get much out of it.

A quick view of this book says much about the deep thought wich Karpov and his co-Author usually apply in their works.