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I also received a copy of this yesterday, and it is indeed both interesting and entertaining. It's a very American book, with lots of stories, often closely related to the material, about interesting events in American chess. The actual chess in it is fascinating, and should be useful, inspiring even, to many players. Assuming that the work is intended mostly for young and improving ones, there is a very commendable emphasis on open positions and active piece play. The evaluations are sometimes biased in White's favor, but in a book of this kind, that's to be expected. I don't think it diminishes the potential usefulness of the book, so long as readers approach it with a little skepticism.
Personally I would have preferred a more straightforward and consistent layout, without so much reliance on special headers and boxed text which, for me at least, increased the difficulty of discovering the place that any given piece of actual chess was supposed to have in the overall presentation. On the other hand, it's clear that the idea behind this method of presentation is to entertain, and it largely succeeds.
As a repertoire, this is more of a shotgun than a rifle, with lots of alternatives for White. The authors suggest four or five different ways of confronting Alekhine's, for example. I don't think that is bad at all for the presumed audience, for whom general principles are more important than theory, and looking at so many different ideas can be quite instructive.
The authors throughout cover the salient points without delving too deeply into every last alternative that Black might play. Even so, the coverage of the positions after 1...e5 is reasonably deep. The authors occasionally lapse into unusually deep coverage of not always very critical positions. For example, they give a surprisingly dense treatment of the Kaidanz Variation of the Modern Two Knights (5.e5 d5 6.Bb5 Ne4 7.Nxd4 Bc5 8.Nxc6!? Bxf7+ 9.Kf1 Qh4), especially given that they eventually prefer 8.Be3. They even cover 8.0-0 at some length.
The degree of exhaustiveness of the coverage diminishes as the work moves out of the open game and into the semi-open. But in general, enough information is presented to suit the needs of what I take to be the intended audience.
The weakest chapter is the final one, whose subject is the Sicilian. One has the impression that there was not enough time to finish it properly, or perhaps not enough money to keep Acers engaged in the project to the last (I merely speculate). In any case, I don't think that the choice of a Sicilian repertoire based on Bb5 was a very good one for what I take to be the intended audience. I'm surprised that with the authors' happy emphasis on gambit-style play, they didn't plump for the Wing Gambit or the Smith-Morra. That would've reduced the burden of work as well, a burden not satisfactorily borne in the final chapter.
I recommend this book without hesitation to young and improving players, and to anyone else who wants to be regaled by Acer's interesting perspective on the game and by the many chess anecdotes he recounts here. It shouldn't be taken very seriously as a work of chess theory, but I don't think it's intended to be.
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Jude Acer's book (Read 12863 times)
