Customer Reviews

Improve Your Opening Play

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

 

 

I am writing this review of Improve Your Opening Play because the other reviews leave a gap or two in explanation. In sum, this book is perfect for the absolute OPENING beginner -- and I don't mean CHESS beginner.

If you're an opening beginner, when you go to the bookstore and see the various titles on openings, you may wonder, "What's the use of learning the Najdorf Variation of the Sicilian when my father's never gonna let me get more than 2 moves into it?"

This book is for you. There are way too few books like Improve Your Opening Play, which accomodates the multitude of players who need to know the opening fundamentals before proceeding on to the much more detailed books on the market.

Reuben Fine's book on the ideas behind the openings, of course, is also a good place to start, but this book is more up-to-date, a little "shorter and sweeter," very well organized, and presents its lessons in a visually simple and effective manner. The IDEAS underlying each move of every opening you are likely to see (an average of 6 to 8 moves out) are thoughtfully presented. The discussion also includes analysis of common variants to many of the more classic moves.

In my opinion, GM Chris Ward, gives just the right amount of information to the new student of the openings, making opening study fun rather than overwhelming, and providing a solid foundation for more advanced study of any opening you may want to pursue. If you thoroughly study this book, when you see a particular opening in play, you will have a grasp of what you should be striving for as well as what your opponent is trying to do, and I, for one, have always felt that the THINKING in chess is what makes this great game fun -- not the memorization.

I like this book a lot, it is a brief synopsis of the overall idea of each of the major openings. Like a previous reviewer noted, it is strictly for beginners and will not teach you an opening. It will, however, give you the basic plan behind the opening and can be the starting point for study (after which you will want to get a dedicated opening book, most likely).

If you look at it as The Ideas Behind the Chess Openings 'lite', you will not be far off. My only major complaint with this book is coverage of the Caro-Kann compared to some other openings. It's basically nonexistant, and you are left feeling a little short changed. The coverage of the Sicilian, on the other hand, is quite good (for a book of this type) mentioning both c3 and several forms of the open (the author is a dragon expert!).

After you read this book, I think the ideas behind the chess openings should be your next book, for a little more detail, then probably choose one or two opening specific books -- the new 'Starting out' series by everyman would probably be a good choice for a novice player. As always, MCO (or NCO -- don't want to start a holy war) will be useful as reference material.

In summary, this book is very good, but is only the first step; you will not find everything you need in this book, only a very broad overview.

This is a great little book, but like so many that I see nowadays, there are certainly pros and cons to this book. (And you should know that I teach chess for a living.)

First off this is one of the newer books by "EVERYMAN Chess." This is a fairly high-quality series of books. The publisher's books have several characteristics that will stand out: The books have a very thick and sturdy "Flex-cover" binding. (If it's not a hard-back, and this one is not.) The pages are thick and high quality, with little bleed-through. These chess books also have a very sturdy binding, unlike many of the other chess books on the market today. (Read the reviews of "The Life & Games of Mikhail Tal," to see what I am talking about.) The books also must have a first rate proofreader, as I have yet to find an error in spelling, grammar, or even a diagram that has an incorrect position. (These types of errors used to plague the chess book market.) So the overall quality of the books from this publisher are generally must higher than is the average for a chess book.

Now not to argue with the other gentleman who wrote a review here, but this book has definite limitations.

First off, the basic premise of this book is brilliant. To have a GM sit down and tell you the basic ideas of an opening and lead you through a few of the pertinent variations is a wonderful idea. I am sure many beginners would think this is a very good concept. Especially helpful are the "warnings" (accompanied by a skull and crossbones) and the "tips." (Accompanied by a light bulb.) Here you do see a lot of the more useful "Do's and Don'ts" of any opening given. Chris Ward does explain the basic concepts of the openings covered.

But it stops short of being a real opening manual. The student really trying to learn any opening will still need to buy this book, maybe a "how-to" book on the opening they want to play AND MCO-14. For instance, the basic coverage of the Caro-Kann stops on the fourth move. True, he does carry on the discussion of this opening in an exercise. But still, the coverage of many of the openings discussed in this book stops around move 5-8. Another deficiency I noticed was a lot of verbiage on various topics, but no real discussion of the general middle-game plans. (For instance, in the King's Indian Defense, White plays on the Q-side and Black plays on the K-side. This is dictated by the pawn structure.)

A simple solution to this problem would have given at least the main line of each variation, stopping where the average opening compendium stops. This would have only added a few pages to this book and would have greatly enhanced the value of it.

If you are an absolute BEGINNER, or you are trying to learn an opening for the first time, I can recommend this book. But the average tournament player will still wind up buying MCO in addition to this book.

I have read the book and it helped me a lot to improve my opening understanding. Chris has a very powerful technique for dealing with opening systems and he explains the important points very clearly, and easy to follow way. So, I recommend the book for the players who want to improve their understanding on the openings, especially Scilian and French defence. I am a 2000 rated player.

In "Improve Your Opening Play", Chris Ward gives a brief overview of the most popular and important openings, and succinctly explains the ideas behind them. Along the way, Ward will sometimes invite the reader to work on an exercise. These are usually pretty brief and fairly easy to solve, but they do help cement certain ideas that one should learn.

The book is comprised of 7 sections:

1) Opening Fundamentals
2) Symmetrical e-pawn Openings
3) Other Defences to 1 e4
4) Symmetrical d-pawn Openings
5) Other Defences to 1 d4
6) Other Openings
7) Solutions to Exercises

All of this information is covered in less than 150 pages, which is not enough to really go into any depth. However, for the beginning player who wants a basic understanding of a lot of different openings, the book is pretty good. There are plenty of diagrams throughout the text and Ward's straightforward writing makes the concepts easy to grasp.

One caveat: Though this book is targeted towards beginners, it is not the first book a beginner should read. Rather, it is a good introduction to chess openings, made for the player who already has a reasonable grasp of basic chess play.

"Improve Your Opening Play" is an excellent FIRST book on openings for a beginner who knows all the basics, but needs a deeper understanding of the purpose of various openings. It will be particularly helpful for occasions when the beginner is white and is met by various popular openings that would put him or her at a disadvantage without some knowledge of the intent, strengths and weaknesses of the various approaches black can take. It will also give the beginning a player a variety of strategies for countering white. This can help a beginner to gain an edge on another beginner who is not familiar with a particular opening.

From a pedagogical standpoint, this book provides a broad overview of each of the most important openings and their variations. This provides a framework for building on the basics and deeper study down the road. The immediate advantage is that the beginner will soon be able to recognize various openenings and avoid major mistakes. It will also give him the knowledge he needs to look up what someone else used against him and do further research.

This book is NOT intended to be a comprehensive text on openings. As such, it is not overwhelming. It provides approximately 6-8 moves of each opening and variation, the simple logic behind these moves and the advantages and disadvantages of the resulting position. It also provides some questions as to how to proceed and encourages the reader to think on their own from there. I think this is a good way to go because it allows new players to learn the basics of the various openings quickly and then experiment on their own. This makes further study more meaningful and with real game experience advanced study will be more productive and beneficial. There is nothing like losing a game because of a bad opening due to lack of understanding to motivate one to learn more!

I have several opening books and although I have been playing chess for a long time, sometimes I feel overwhelmed reading them. It is much more interesting for me to master general concepts and then build upon each of the major themes over time. This partly because I only have limited time to devote to the game and studying it. This is probably the boat most people are in. If you like chess, but are turned off by the density and apparent complexity of other openings book, this might be just right for you.

Chris Ward writes in a simple, straightforward and conversational tone. This makes this text very readable and the major principles easy to digest. There are also lots of useful diagrams and he doesn't present so many moves between diagrams that it is difficult to memorize the board position. In short, this is an informative and enjoyable read.

Lastly, while the book isn't exhaustive in its treatment of openings, it does provide some strategic guidelines as to how to continue. It doesn't give examples, but it encourages you to experiment with the position. I think this is a great approach in a world of <$20.00 chess engines with tutoring capability. As a pianist, I know that reading about music is not the same as practicing. I think the same applies to chess, you need to digest a certain amount of material and then apply it in real game situations before learning more. In summary, I think this book accomplishes its objective of providing beginners with just enough opening material to give them basic understanding, some direction as to how to go forward and enough challenge that learning is exciting rather than frustrating or overwhelmin.

This book contains flawed analysis (on the Möller Attack and others) which is really not acceptable. The book gives a glimpse of several major openings (to its credit) but stops its analysis arbitrarily and does not really emphasise the fundamental underlying principles which it claims to do. It is patchy and not good. I feel like Chris Ward must have written this book while he was bored one day, and it took him less than an hour...