An openings book for everyone?
Chess Opening Essentials: The Ideas & Plans Behind ALL Chess Openings (Volume 1: The Complete 1.e4) is the title of a new book co-authored by Stefan Djuric, Dimitri Komarov, and Claudio Pantaleoni, and I think I like it (the book, that is)! It covers, over the course of 340 pages (this doesn't count the table of contents, the introduction, the index, etc.), at least a little bit about practically every line in the 1.e4 openings. The coverage isn't what you'd find in a work like ECO or even MCO; it's much briefer, but in exchange there's a lot of useful verbal commentary and an incredible 385 illustrative games (mostly unannotated).
I'll be reviewing it for Chess Today soon, but my initial reaction is that it's a book that this is a very useful book for players in the 1500-2000 range, but those outside it (on both ends) can benefit - even a quick browse taught me a thing or two about lines outside my normal repertoire. The book is like a cross between the wonderful but hopelessly out of date Chess Openings: Theory and Practice by I.A. Horowitz and the likewise out of date The Ideas Behind the Chess Openings by Reuben Fine. Chess Opening Essentials has fewer variations than the Horowitz book and less coverage of particular structures than Fine's work, but as a general reference it's quite useful. Along with Andy Soltis's Pawn Structure Chess, I think it's one of the very few nearly indispensable works on the openings that belong in every amateur's library.
I'll be reviewing it for Chess Today soon, but my initial reaction is that it's a book that this is a very useful book for players in the 1500-2000 range, but those outside it (on both ends) can benefit - even a quick browse taught me a thing or two about lines outside my normal repertoire. The book is like a cross between the wonderful but hopelessly out of date Chess Openings: Theory and Practice by I.A. Horowitz and the likewise out of date The Ideas Behind the Chess Openings by Reuben Fine. Chess Opening Essentials has fewer variations than the Horowitz book and less coverage of particular structures than Fine's work, but as a general reference it's quite useful. Along with Andy Soltis's Pawn Structure Chess, I think it's one of the very few nearly indispensable works on the openings that belong in every amateur's library.