Wednesday, March 12, 2008

A Paper Review on the Net


I just now noticed that Glenn Flear's review of "The Ruy Lopez: A Guide for Black" in New in ChessYearbook 83 is available as a pdf-file at the New in Chess Website. Flear is one of my favorite chess book reviewers and I suppose that the reviewer position in the NiC Yearbooks must be among the most prestigious there are. Only laziness has prevented me from quoting his review earlier. But with the possibility to just cut and past I have picked some of the quotes I liked the most:

"Despite being inexperienced in authorship, the young Norwegian GM (for the record, he’s 2537!) has done an excellent job of bringing the present state of theory to the public’s attention. In several lines his convincing analysis demonstrates why Khalifman and others have underestimated Black’s resources."

"The use of English is excellent, as for that matter are the style and attention to detail, even in the slower positional lines, making the whole package a pleasure to read. A nice touch is the inclusion of a number of quotations, which adds humour and a human touch that others would do well to follow.

I would advise anybody up to grandmaster to take the time to read the ‘Preface by Leif’, an object lesson in the process of preparing a repertoire. Something that is often misunderstood by lesser mortals."

"It’s fairly well documented that, as a rule, Gambit, tend to include more game references and analytic variations in the notes than Everyman do (this is immediately noticeable when you flick through this book and compare it with Andrew Greet’s). In certain Gambit books in the past there has been a tendency to go over the top, but here the complexity of the variation requires plenty of material to tell the whole story. Overall I felt that they have got the balance
about right between text, home analysis, previous experience and conclusions, and even the ubiquitous C212s are kept within bounds."

Maybe some of these quotes will soon appear at Gambit's review collection for the RL book?

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