Thursday, January 29, 2009

Dangerous Weapons - Dutch













For the moment I find the Dutch defence one of the most interesting opening subjects. Nonetheless I was not exactly ecstatic to see that Everyman is announcing a new book in their series Dangerous Weapons: The Dutch.

The three authors are all very competent so of course my slight feeling of disappointment has to do with timing. I would much have preferred to have the book available before completing "Win with the Stonewall Dutch". The book is being set and is announced for March so there is not a lot to be done anyway. But there might just have been room for some small but valuable updates.

One advantage of writing on the Dutch is that a complete repertoire can still be fitted within a reasonably sized book. But the anti-Dutch lines are constantly expanding and in the not too distant future they will demand a separate volume.

I hope the book will be balanced in the way that it doesn't concentrate too much on White's minor systems. There are a lot of minor systems for Black that would fit perfectly in the Dangerous Weapon series.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

The Dangerous Weapons book is due in Feb 2010, so I for one am glad you are not waiting on it...

I am happy to hear your book will be out soon; looking forward to it.

Sverre Johnsen said...

You are right. One year is a very long time to wait!

Anyway, I have very little influence on when our Stonewall book will be published. I may stall it for a couple of weeks but that's all. So even waiting for Rendle's Play the Dutch is out of the question.

I expect the proofs for the book to arrive any day now, and the great question will be how much new material we will be able to squeeze in. After the proofs have been set it's normally only possible to replace one block of text with another one of the same size. Otherwise the change will influence the following pages - which is very undesirable.

There are always some questions (mainly analytical) from the editor that have to be answered. In addition I have a few analytical improvements and a couple of new game references that I will give top priority to include. However, in these matters the final decisions are with Gambit Publishing.