Customer Reviews

Opening for Black According to Karpov (Repertoire Books)

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Learning how to play in the Opening is one of the most important, yet difficult tasks that every chess player is facing. If you are a beginner, there are better books on the market for you, including the "Starting out..." series. But those who are ready to go beyond the general opening principles and a couple of opening moves will find this book very helpful. It addresses the following positive issues:

1. Complete selection for Black covering ALL White first moves,
2. Very qualified author - FIDE ex-champion A. Khalifman
3. Extremely good source - games of Anatoly Karpov
4. Repertoire approach - when the games are sorted into a variation trees and somewhere earlier enough the moves finish and the author explains common strategies and offers suggestions.

Despite short lives of many opening books due to extensive development of the modern chess opening theory , this book will serve middle range players (1400-2200) for many years, because it is plan-oriented.

Good Luck!

Copyrighted by me

I think the "Opening for White" series, including the five books based on Kramnik and the newer ones based on Anand, are spectacular, wonderful books. But, for no apparent reason, this book based on Karpov's black repertoire (at one time) is not nearly as good. A big part of this is the lack of materia. Whereas, the Kramnik series was five volumes, this one prsents an entire back repertoire in one volume that is only around 200 pages. This means that many variations are not found in this book. It is still pretty good, but very disappointing compared to the excellent volumes that make up the remainder of the series.