Amazon made me wait longer than they originally said too, but I did get my copy of volume 2 last week.

For me, you can't have too much analysis. But my point was that if a sideline gets 5 pages, it is a bit strange to only give the mainline 1 page.

Agree you can correct the books weaknesses with a database. My criticiism was that you pretty much have to, or you wont know what lines you are likely to see over the board. 

Personally I do like an author to point me in the right direction, I never have the time to look at all the raw games properly. In fact that is why I like this site, I would have ignored the qa4 game if Jonathan had not included it.

I have both of the volumes released so far, and overall I am happy to have them. But I think Hansen's three star rating is fair, and could probably be applied to the second volume too. 

Batsford designate the book for club players, but the analysis is deeper than that in any other recent caro book I have, even if it has clearly been delayed since 2004. However the book is often hard to follow, without clear structure, recommendations, or indication what are the critical lines.

For example, the worst example seems to be in the chapter on 1e4 c6 2c4. The chapter is 30 pages long, and covers some sidelines I've never seen in reasonable detail. But the mainline 2...d5 3cd cd 4 ed nf6 is not included, and only appears in the illustrated games. If you didn't know that most GM games (including Karpov's) follow this, you might think 4..qd5 was the mainline, since this is the only move given after 4ed.

For me, with a few years caro experiance, I am happier to have an uneven book with interesting analysis rather than a nicely produced but superficial one. But I do not think I would recommend this series to someone thinking of learning the opening from scratch.

I've got to say that IMHO the review at Chessbase is a bit over the top. The book is very good and I would say it was worth nearer a 4star bordering on 5star rating due to its analysis. 

And for good measure how Carsten gave Pedersen's French 5 stars was beyond my comprehension. Overall I think Carsten calls it right about 90 % of the time and I do value his initial reviews to see whether a book is worth looking at myself.

I have no information on Carsten's german translation - I wouldn't be surprised if this book has been at the printers for quite a while as I've been aware of this Caro book for almost 2 years now !

Finally, this is a 3 volume series and I believe that Vol 3 is to cover Nd7 and Bf5 - I don't know whether Nf6 is going to be examined.

But are these books really good ?

As you can see on Chesscafe.com (Checkpoint by Carsten Hansen ) on the firt one :
www.chesscafe.com/hansen/hansen.htm

"There are a number of problems with this book. First and foremost is that I am unable to locate any game references after 2004. In fact, the entire Illustrative Games section, which itself is rather old-fashioned, only has games from 2004. Secondly, the book suffers from a poor translation and lazy editing."
and
"There are also several inconsistencies between this book and one published in German in 2005, Caro-Kann Verteidigung... richtig gespielt, authored by Karpov!"

So I will wait and see for the volume 2...

HgMan wrote on 12/08/06 at 21:50:53:



My understanding from what i read somewhere was that Karpov was doing a full series on the caro-kann. So I would expect at least a third book or possibly a third and fourth.

TalJechin wrote on 05/31/06 at 18:29:10:


This seems to be a repertoire book. Any idea if she will be covering 4...Bf5 or will she be covering 4...Nd7?

According to german distributor Niggemann (usually well informed)
the second english volume (Panov) will be avaible on Dec 8th 2006.

tracke