You have a book extract at http://www.everymanchess.com/chess/books/Play_the_Dutch%3A_An_Opening_Repertoire...

The book should be out in October. Neil does his usual excellent job of explaining all the key strategical ideas and common tactical motifs to the club player, while presenting a repertoire. Plenty of Bartel games are included for sure!
In the main line Leningrad, both 7 Nc3 c6 and 7...Nc6 8 d5 Na5 are covered.

Its also now disappeared from the 'Coming soon' section on the Everyman homepage. I hope this doesn't mean that it will be delayed even further. 

Don't get your hopes up too much, McDonald's books are seldom heavy on theory as he prefers to point out useful strategic stuff. 

7...Nc6 is an interesting line, but 8.d5 Na5 9.Qa4 is something of a headache for black (although quite rare in practice in my experience), and the main mainline nowadays is shifting towards b3-systems a la Avrukh, so even if you find something nice vs Qa4 you might not get to reel it out.

One thing that would interest me, would be if McD takes a closer look at different new(ish) ideas for black, for example how Bartel handles the Leningrad by postponing d6. That would have been an obvious candidate for the Dangerous Weapons book on the Dutch, but evidently there was no Leningrader in the author team...

Since I owned Kindermann's "Leningrad System" I have regularly been playing the Leningrad and I think it is a very nice line to have at one's arsenal. Because this book advocates 7...Qe8 , I only play this line but I really would like to add 7...Nc6 to my repertoire as an alternate. After the main move 8.d5, 8...Na5 is the more sound option while 8...Ne5 is crazy and very entertaining. With the latter, I know games where Black sacs "a few" pieces to demolish white pawn cover (ie.h2, g3,f2) then proceeds to win in style. But I assume that is not everyone's cup of tea since I also think it should be objectively dubious to pursue such an approach at every game. I am really curious to see what line this new book will advice, if it is ever made out to the book shelves I mean.
Kindermann's book is very nice for those who consider playing the Leningrad. Maybe it is the best opening book I have ever owned, and I have lots of them believe me.

Touche, Antillian! 

Pier lala wrote on 01/26/10 at 09:53:05:


Don't really think young superGMs read books. Or so a certain young superGM mentioned a while back. Not since Informant went digital.

What are openings books? Summarising, explaining chessbase games for the rest of us.

SuperGMs dont need it explaining. 

Oh, and Kindermann's is a good book by the way (I am a mere non-playing 22-2300 btw).

Pier lala wrote on 01/25/10 at 20:15:08:

It is an obvious question isn't it? The Leningrad gets a lot of books given that is not necessarily getting constantly re-evaluated due to top-level GM games (okay, written on day 2 after Kramnik-Nakamura). Well, if he focusses on the Nc6 or c6 lines instead of Qe8 as in Kindermann's book, then this would potentially make a lot of sense. E.g. with Nc6 there's still plenty of unexplored ground.