Some further thoughts on study material for open positions:

I have taken the Morphy tip to heart and picked up Franco's Morphy: Move by Move when Everyman ran a sitewide ebook sale recently.

I also only yesterday discovered a little-known book I hadn't been aware of at all: Gambit Busters: Take It, Keep It... And Win! by Sam Collins. Lots of interesting material on all the dangers of gambit openings and how to react and defend when facing gambits over the board. Defending against gambits will usually involve fairly open positions where you're behind in development, so this looks like a perfect book to counterbalance all the positive writing on development and initiative. Strangely I can't find this book anywhere on the Everyman website, but the Kindle version is very cheap on Amazon.

So now my Open positions curriculum looks something like this:

Franco: Morphy: Move by Move
Marovic: Ch. 2: The Open Centre in Dynamic Pawn Play in Chess
Beim: Ch. 8: Symmetrical Pawn-Structures in Lessons in Chess Strategy
(+ similar chapters in Kotov/Keres, Euwe/Kramer, Pachman, Hellsten)
Damsky: The Heavy Pieces in Action
Cozens and Nunn: The King-Hunt
Collins: Gambit Busters

And beyond that I still have the four tactically-minded players in Everyman's The Masters series lined up for study, and material on attacking play, the advantage of the bishop pair, and the isolated queen's pawn as related side projects.

ReneDescartes wrote on 08/09/18 at 20:08:37:

A belated thanks for this summary, I'm sure I will find it helpful both when I enjoy Morphy attacks and defend tooth and nail with Collins.

Thanks guys for all your thoughtful replies! I was half expecting this thread to just descend into oblivion.

You are basically confirming my suspicion that there isn't much recent material on this. But on the other hand a lot of the old material by Keres/Kotov, Euwe/Kramer, (the slightly newer) Marovic and others may still be worth reading.

About miniature books: I looked for Nunn's Grandmaster Secrets: Winning Quickly at Chess in the Gambit Studio app, but surprisingly it's not there. I have Burgess' more encyclopaedic The Quickest Chess Victories of All Time - there should be some good examples there even though finding them is more work.

I'm also reminded of another Nunn book (sort of) that I have but never read: The King Hunt by Cozens, updated by Nunn with many games added some time in the 90s.

Material on the topic "lead in development" is also relevant: I think Hellsten's Mastering Opening Strategy has something on that, and I recall a decent section on the lead in development in symmetrical positions in Colin Crouch: Attacking Technique.

About players: Thanks for the Morphy tip. He's on my radar, but the only material I have on him is Del Rosario's book (very good but geared towards beginners) and Marin's thoughtful chapter in Secrets of Attacking Chess on the real reasons Morphy beat Adolf Anderssen despite Anderssen being in many ways the more sophisticated player.

I also have the entire The Masters series from Everyman on my study plan: Four nice books with tactics from the games of (respectively) Spielmann, Alekhine, Tal and Spassky. My plan is to solve the tactics first and only then go through game collections on/by the same players (The Art of Sacrifice in Spielmann's case). Sort of a compromise because I have realized I'll never find the time to go through the games collections of many of the world champions solitaire/"guess the move" style, which was once my ambition. Anyway, there should be plenty of open positions in the games of those four.

It is hard to think of modern top players who are especially well-known for their play in open positions. Maybe Shirov, but he's not part of the elite anymore. And Kasparov's occasional use of the more open Scotch and even the Evans Gambit instead of the Ruy must mean something. Anyone who plays the Grünfeld regularly as Black is also ready to blow up the centre and play fairly open positions if White plays too slowly. And Morozevich has tried some of the most open defences to 1.d4 possible: The Chigorin and the Albin. But maybe that was more due to their being offbeat and somewhat underestimated at the time than their open character.

Hector is an interesting character: It's a bit impressive that he's that well-known as a creative attacking wizard despite remaining an "ordinary" GM in the 2500-2550 range and not publishing anything on his own games (that I'm aware of; maybe there's something in Swedish).

LeeRoth wrote on 08/10/18 at 01:27:39:


I was reminded of an Amazon customer review of the Marovic book which included this:  "It is like having a greatly expanded and better organized version of the essay 'Various Pawn Positions in the Center' by Alexander Kotov (in the collection of papers titled 'The Art of the Middlegame' by Kotov and Keres)."  I see that Kotov had a section on the Open Center of about 8 pages, while the Marovic chapter is about 35 pages.

A couple of thoughts. I was also backwards in my development, i.e. I switched to 1.d4 after learning and using a 1.e4 repertoire book for a while, took a jump and then for a long time struggled relatively in open positions.

I don't know of any books on open positions either, but then Markovich used to say that there just isn't that much strategy, as such, in open positions. He implied that it's mostly just piece play, attacking play, endgame play, etc. Despite that, I found that it was helpful to remember to watch for targets and think backwards from those: within empty regions, to look for points from which pieces might hit those targets and for transit squares through which pieces might get to those points. This, which I got from my own observation, was not natural to me, and when I started doing it, open positions became a lot closer in ease to closed positions for me.

The Euwe-Kramer material (especially on "positional preponderance in the center," i.e. pawns on e4 and d4 vs. e6, or e4 and d4 vs. d6--I just glanced at it--should not be not be that dated, since the strategic themes are quite simple and the piece placements are very fluid in open positions anyway.

Also, it occurs to me that a book on Morphy ought to serve well, since Morphy laid out ideal play in open middlegame positions according to Botvinnik. Franco and Beim have good books from which which I have read games.  I also know good players who studied Bronstein's 200 Open Games, though I don't own it. Also Franco's great book on Spassky, whom one master I know thinks the greatest 1.e4 stylist. Both Spassky and Morphy generally conducted their attacks in such a way as to bring as many reinforcements into the struggle as possible.

A lot of the games in the "advantages of the IQP" sections of IQP books, especially Baburin's, have to do with what to do after the IQP is cleared and White winds up merely with better piece placement, which is, however, often a fatal advantage.

I think endgame study helped me a lot, since the positions are often very open.

Perhaps some material from specific opening books would also be useful--maybe the Open Spanish in Ponzetto and King's Spanish book and  the Goering and Danish gambits, the Two Knights, and so on in Bologan, Marin, and others who have included explanatory chapters in their open-games books.

Together, it seems to me, these materials ought to cover many of the sources which open positions come from.