Customer Reviews

The Samisch King's Indian (Batsford Chess Library)

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

 

 

With its black and hot pink design, this book commonly is overlooked by people online or in bookstores. The variation, even moreso, gets overlooked by players who "book up" against the King's Indian Defence (KID) and play the main line or a more quiet sideline. The Saemisch (played with 5.f3 instead of 5.Nf3) is a strong reply to black's play and will teach you oodles of lessons that can be applied beyond simply the KID.

Before I go any further, don't just look at the rating this book has and buy it. I gave it five stars, but it's up in the air whether it deserves four or five. It doesn't appeal to every player, either, so read about it first!

That said...the nice thing about this opening is that it takes black "out of his garden" as John Cox puts it. A King's Indian player is looking for a positional attacking game that explodes tactically on the kingside. The Samisch guarantees this sequence of events -- in opposite order. Many positions include white attacking on the kingside, much like in the Dragon, while black counters on the queenside (where white's king resides). Many complex positional and tactical factors make this one of the best openings for your thinking and problem solving skills out there. You are required to be extremely adept both tactically and positionally to play the Samisch.

So what about the book? As is customary, I'll quote David Norwood, who offers a profound insight into chess literature: "There are almost certainly more books written on chess than other sport or hobby, and yet so few can be read with anything approaching pleasure. Many opening books are little more than print-offs of ChessBase variations, with the analysis courtesy of Fritz. Any monkey could write them and I suspect that a lot of the time, they do."

So it comes down to this: is Joe Gallagher writing like a monkey, or like a GM? Well, both. The book gives great GM-level textual analysis of how to play this opening. Gallagher goes beyond simply saying "put your pieces like this" and often gives more advanced middlegame plans, what to avoid, what kinds of moves/motifs are common, and how to break down the black kingside. This is useful for those of us who sometimes become frustrated when our games become more complicated than surface-level plans that are included in a lot of books.

The reason that this book receives either 4 OR 5 stars has to do with how you like to read chess books. If you're the type who meticulously runs through every variation, this book is a steal. If you have trouble discriminating between lines to check out and lines to ignore, this book should only have 4 stars, or even 3. It's a very tactical opening, so it's important to look at all the possibilities, but at the same time it can be a pain to slog through the muddy river of 19th move variants. The reason I decided on 5 stars is that the textual analysis is really revealing, and makes up for the overly complicated tactical lines and game references.

All in all, this book is a solution to the KID. If you have had trouble in the past with black's pet fianchetto system, get this book and try out the opening. It's very fun to play, offers a lifetime of analysis, and Gallagher's book will give you a thorough understanding of how to play the system.