Monday, April 2, 2007

Silman's Review has Arrived

My apologies for missing an entry last week. I am having a very busy schedule these days and even rephrasing leftover text bits takes too much time and energy. So again I will only refer to a book review - this time at the excellent Silman's reviews. The review is by Silman himself this time (there are three other very competent regular reviewers at his site: Bauer, Donaldson and Watson) and it's one of his meatier ones. In addition to the actual review we get an old but very relevant Silman win against de Firmian with 9...Qd7 in the Closed Ruy Lopez.

Actually it seems that Silman is the first of the reviewers to really notice (and point out) how central the early ...Qd7 lines are in our book. These lines not only avoids a lot of theory, they add a lot of extra options to Blacks play and they are Black's most important resource if he wants to avoid the Zaitsev draw 10...Re8 11.Ng5 Rf8 12.Nf3 Re8.

Like a few other reviewers, Silman loves the preface by Leif and is a bit sceptical about our choice of the theory heavy Zaitsev as Black's main weapon. I hoped the reasons for our decision outlined in our book would be sufficiently convincing. But it's quite likely I will return this in a later entry.

If you are not already familiar with it, make sure that you have a look at Silman's impressive chess site - not only his review section. It's definitely one of the better chess places on the net. It has got a lot of instructive material and is regularly updated.

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