Firebird comes in quite handy during correspondence games. At least until your opponent gets the same idea, in which case you have to use your brains.

arcee wrote on 05/27/10 at 13:37:57:


Why would you want to exchange queens?  I'd play 6.Qe3 and plan Nc3, Bd2 and O-O-O.  Queen eventually to g3 most likely.  Just like a center game except that Black has the crappy ...c5 in.

arcee wrote on 05/27/10 at 10:54:51:


This looks to be an enormous positional error. I'd move the queen, and play Nc3, Bc4, and possibly 0-0-0. Black should be much worse already.

That is of course clear to me (otherwise chess would be trivial), but at least some directions could be clear.

I have done a small research and found some Nd2 lines (as played by Sveshnikov) interesting. Perhaps I will post some concrete lines (if you are interested) at a later point.

Nobody interested in the Scotch? 

I finally received my copy of this book on Friday and spent some time looking at it over the weekend.  I have not yet delved very deeply into the chess, but to all appearances it's one of Chess Stars' better efforts.  I am somewhat familiar with the theory of the Mieses Variation, having played it for some time as Black, and Barsky's coverage there looks better than adequate.  He also has some interesting new ideas about 6.Bd3 d5 7.e5.  My impression had been that Black was simply better there, but he makes a case for White's chances in the pawn-down game that arises.  This being a repertoire book, Barsky confines himself to the exchange on c6 after both 4...Bc5 and 4...Bb4+ 5.c3 Bc5.  I'm less familiar with the theory of that, but Barsky makes some interesting arguments.  Laudably, he spends a good deal of time treating Black's less theoretically prominent tries.  He devotes a good-sized section to White's play against 4...Qh4.

The English is up to Chess Stars' recent standard, which is to say fully adequate but with the occasional odd-sounding expression.  The strange-sounding verb-adverb-object word order (e.g. "protect well e4"), evidently common in the Slavic languages, appears throughout.  Still I suppose I'm perhaps one of the few chess players who cares about good English in chess books.  Frankly also I am less annoyed by Slavic-sounding word order than I am by the chirrupy diction that you find in so many English-English chess books, not to mention the plague of whilsts that unfortunately afflicts them.  

Actually since Barsky does the reader the favor of showing diagrams of key terminal positions, I was able to look at the chess of the book a little bit.  I am not strong enough to criticize Barsky's chess judgment in any case, but his evaluations mostly made sense to me.  There was one position that I wondered about and I may come back here with it. 

So from my admittedly somewhat superficial point of view, it appears to be a work well worth having, mostly for prospective Whites but perhaps also for Blacks.

From what I´ve heard the book is not that big? My doubt is that given this, and the peculiar format of "Quick Repertoire", "step by step", blah blah blah, it means a lot of stuff is being repeated also. Frankly I have to admit I´m not a fan of that book format since it lends itself to repetition.

Bump.

Any more thoughts on this? 
Any more considered views now from people who have spent time with the text? Am considering purchasing, so would appreciate some feedback. Thanks muchly in advance any who may be able to opine....