Quote:I do not agree with his choice of variation for white in the chigorin. 3. Nf3 bg4 4. Nc3 seems to me like a better fit for his repetoire than the line he gave which is, as bonsai put it, scary for white.
I'm not sure whether 3.Nf3 Bg4 4.Nc3 really fits better with his repertoire, doesn't he often try to avoid Nf3 systems? And 3.cxd5 is definitely super-ambitious like a lot of Ward's other lines.
However I've finally had a chance to look at the book when I was on a business trip to London and dropped by the big Chess & Bridge shop in Euston Road. I did have a look at the Chigorin chapter and saw that he basically says that after 1.d4 d5 2.c4 Nc6 3.cxd5 Qxd5 4.e3 e5 5.Nc3 Bb4 6.Bd2 Bxc3 7.Bxc3 exd4 8.Ne2 Nf6 9.Nxd4 0-0 10.Nb5 Qg5 the only question is whether white should play h2-h4 before taking on c7, but that white is great in either case. And then he leaves it at that. Erm, wait, this is - as far as I know - the most theoretically and topical line in the 3.cxd5 system, it's supposed to offer black a massive attack if you take on c7 immediately and 11.h4 Qh6! is supposed to be pretty good for black, too, but Ward just leaves the reader alone in this situation???
Okay, I suppose this repertoire has a target audience that will not be constantly playing against theoretically well-prepared opponents, but abandoning your readers in such a sharp position after giving them a - as far as I know - completely over-optimistic assessement of their position does seem pretty extreme. At least Dunnington (when he recommended the same line in
Attacking with 1.d4) gave a bit of extra analysis and all the black ressources had not been found at that time either, but nowadays black's various promising continuations should be fairly well-known.
Surely Ward checked something like the Chessbase magazines and/or the Informator? It's not like I expect he would look at Broznik's great book about the Chigorin, I of course greatly appreciate it when author's look precisely at what's been recommended in specialist books for the other side of the opening (e.g. Delchev/Semkov checked Experts vs. the Sicilian and Kindermann did make recommendations against Khalifman's Kramnik repertoire), but why do people tend to try to dismiss perfectly good and reasonable openings like the Chigorin (or the Modern Benoni etc.) as just bad with so little analysis? Sometimes author's should just be more honest to their readers and they should simply admit that there are just a lot of perfectly reasonable systems against their pet opening/repertoire that give the other side interesting play and/or an equal or nearly equal position. Do they maybe feel they would discourage readers when those reaslise that a lot of these footnotes are perfectly viable choices? Or do they feel readers would feel the author should have worked harder on all the lines that are assessed as equal and that the author should somehow have magically produced at least a "a bit better"?
And just to clarify this: I am not saying that Ward is particularly bad in this respect, in fact I haven't even looked overly closely at most of the rest of the book. It's just that in my opinion the example of his coverage of the Chigorin is a particularly typical case of superficial work and I believe his coverage here is a bit like saying "I recommend you should play 1.e4 e5 2.f4 exf4 3.Nf3 g5 4.Bc4 as white and black can hardly dare to play 4...g4 as white then gets a great position due to the many opportunities for sacrifices on f7." Surely nobody would think that would suffice as a white repertoire at any level?