ErictheRed wrote on 05/08/14 at 15:11:22:

I stated that it is perfectly possible to understand something by just listening or reading about a subject. The possibility of course depends on several factors: time, focus, intellectual capabilities, basics (e.g. knowing the rules of the game).

In fact Peter states that he didn't look to any books in advance but by looking to the megadatabase in advance of making the analysis he indirectly anyway did. People are copycats. Books copy what people play and people copy what books tell us.

Jupp53 wrote on 05/08/14 at 11:18:36:

I don't agree with that. It is perfectly possible to understand something by just listening or reading about it. If not then schools, teachers, coaches, books,... would make no sense.
In fact for most of us, learning from others is in most cases the quickest method to understand something instead of trying to find out everything oneself.

Peter Lalic wrote on 05/07/14 at 22:16:30:


It seems to be out on .de and .co.uk parts of amazon.

Though I'm not sure what to make of "12 new from £9.53 2 used from £13.95" ?!

Its definitely an interesting (and very brave!) way to do it Maybe relatively logical given the existence of the Greet starting book.

Well, only time and reviews will tell!
Generally chess books receive more reviews on Amazon.com, but apparently mine won't be released in America until June.

Stefan Buecker wrote on 05/07/14 at 14:27:15:

Not knowing any earlier published theoretical analyses, certainly improves the creativity and reduces the prejudices which often makes that one misses possible ameliorations.

However the serious drawback is that often for more than 90% of the analysis you are just reinventing the wheel. That is a massive amount of time which one better spends on different analyses. There is always new stuff to analyze in a complex opening so the job is never finished.

Personally I very much doubt the benefits of the "stone age approach" outweigh the disadvantages.

I've been playing the (hyper)accelerated dragon for almost 5 years now but lately got a bit tired of it. This thread renewed my interest so I decided to buy the book

Peter Lalic wrote on 05/07/14 at 14:24:44:


Well, if you've eliminated all errors, then it's all well and good. I'm still struggling to understand why you chose to do it this way in the first place; it must have taken an eternity to enter all the moves manually, not to mention the hours and hours of subsequent error-checking. You must've done the initial work in ChessBase, so why not just copy the moves straight from there and save yourself a massive amount of work and tedium? How you work is entirely your business of course, but I just can't see any possible upside to the way you've done it.

So the book was finished in February this year, but the Introduction was written back in April 2013. This would appear to be another example of your original approach, as the Introduction is normally the last thing the author will write before submitting the manuscript. I'm surprised that the editor didn't change the date, as readers will more than likely assume, as I did, that April 2013 was the date when the book was completed.

(Edit: just read the message back and I don't mean to give you a hard time about entering the moves manually - I'm just a bit baffled by it, but there's no reason for you to justify yourself to me if you don't want to.)