The quickest intro in my view to get a feel for the the Leningrad variation would be the good but now old book by Steffen Pedersen.

Stigma wrote on 06/19/16 at 12:59:55:


What I like to do when going though a DVD is collect all the games where the variations in the presentation stops and then go through them myself. This means a slower and hopefully more productive run through a DVD, and the method takes a number of sittings. This is why I prefer DVDs linked to Chessbase. For others, I have compiled my own databases of some of them.

Yes, erring does irritate me, but not as much as the presenter having a cold 

Some presenters errrred a lot in their earlier videos, but got better, so they must have taken steps to improve their talking skills!

I gave up on Marin's Classical Sicilian DVD for the same reason. The pausing devices just overtake the actual speech. It's horrific.
Appears a thorough fellow, but is just unwatchable for the reason stated. Would be a worthy replacement for waterboarding, if the CIA are reading this.

JEH wrote on 06/19/16 at 03:45:21:

Marin's insights and observations are, as always, excellent. In spite of this, though, I'm afraid I gave up less than halfway through this DVD as his constant and intrusive 'umming' simply became too much for me to bear. If you can tolerate that for five-and-a-quarter hours, then the DVD is worth getting.

Kindermann's book (in English) is the one big hole in my collection of Leningrad books. I already had the slightly shorter German edition (2002), so I didn't bother. But later I heard there were some really important updates between the editions... The instructive material at the start is great through (maybe even that was improved?)

The Beim book has some brief instructive material, basically two games showing typical ways for White and Black to win. But more importantly he has 35 exercises at the end, which of course I have never bothered to solve . From a brief look and reading of the instructions, most feature tactical or attacking ideas, for both sides - could be useful to go through after digesting Kindermann's material.

Be forewarned about the actual theory though: I noticed an older thread here where Beim was criticized for sloppy analysis, though he does cover some interesting, offbeat lines that are rarely discussed, like 7...c6 but NOT aiming for a quick ...e5.

The fairly new Marin DVD is supposed to be all about themes and understanding as well. But I haven't seen it, so I don't have an opinion.

For theory, apart from Flear's consistently good work here, the last word is the Malaniuk/Marusenko book from 2014. Though I still go back to McDonald's Play the Dutch a lot - I have the (maybe superficial) impression that he was looking more for unbalanced play, while M'n'M are more concerned with safety and equalizing - to the limited extent those terms even apply to the Leningrad!

Agree below. The Kindermann book is wonderful. Sheer class.
The guy's got a knack for organization of material and clarity of exposition.
That and Winawer 0-0 (with some red text!) - high quality stuff. Pity he's not produced a load more.

TalJechin wrote on 06/16/16 at 17:45:25:

Neil McDonald - Play the Dutch is the one to get.

Don't know how his Starting Out book relates to his other works. But generally it goes with "you're a Dutch player first", i.e. 1...f5, so you will be able to skip some chapters.

If you hold back ...f5 until White has played c4, your biggest decision will be to choose a 7th move in the ML (7...c6/7...Qe8/7...Nc6). Apart from that White has some ideas of Nh3-f4 +d4-d5 or 7.d5 to rule out 7...Nc6 (many White players have a fear of being attacked with 7...Nc6 8.d5 Ne5). Plus a few 1.c4, g3, Bg2 etc which usually transpose with a later d4, but 1 in 5 will stick to the English with d3+e4 or d3+e3, etc. - This paragraph contains 95% of what you will encounter if you wait for c4.