Paddy wrote on 05/01/21 at 17:09:55:
So, not a complete waste of money by any means, but not quite what I was expecting. Dedicated Philidor fans should certainly consider getting hold of a copy.
My book arrived today. I'm glad I bought it. I'm not glad how much I had to pay for shipping, but that's on me.
In addition to the three things mentioned by Paddy there's a fourth one: Many evaluation symbols in the update section have been replaced by a placeholder [?]. I have a very good idea how it happened technically. But from an editorial point of view I'm not sure which explanation would be worse: didn't check, checked but didn't notice, or noticed but decided to ship as-is. "Fortunately", they only used proper symbols for some of the evaluations. Others were done as ordinary ascii keys, so it's still possible to read these: +- , += , = , =+ , -+ . That means the [?]'s could be: +/- , -/+ , unclear , compensation. Those are far enough apart that in most cases I can guess from the context. If in doubt I will turn on the engine and should be able to decipher the meaning that way.
I put any defects in the book on the publisher, not the author. And indeed, unlike
The Philidor Files which is [c] 2006 Christian Bauer,
Tout sur le Philidor 2e édition is [c] Alain Benlolo 2020.
Quote:When I learned Le Pion Passé was preparing to reissue Tout sur le Philidor, I didn't hesitate long before proposing to them to bring up to date certain variations. It seemed a shame, given the evolution of the theory, not to dust off the lines I analyzed 15 years ago.
--Christian Bauer, page 237 (my translation)
I will look at a couple of lines later. Once nice thing about having a separate update at the end is, it made it much simpler for me to compare the English and French first editions. What I saw is the chess content and even the verbiage is the same, except of course one is in English and the other is in French. Another nice thing is, since I already went through the first edition, now I can skip right to the updated parts. Of course anybody who doesn't have a first edition will be annoyed that they have to look in two places in one book.