an ordinary chessplayer wrote on 04/02/21 at 15:40:30:
To my mind more nitty-gritty is more theoretical not less.
I always prefer more variations and fewer words, so I'm not sure if I should be the one to recommend books for you.
My dream chess book would be focused mostly on the pawn structures (or "fragments"), the major decisions that both players must make, the common strategies used by both sides and how to handle them, and a gallery of common tactical and attacking patterns. And only then delve into the theory.
For instance in the Botvinnik English, you play Nd5, Black captures and you have the choice of cxd5 or exd5. This is one of the major decisions White must make and I would like to see a solid section explaining the impact of each recapture and the conditions under which they are good/bad, to help guide players in making this decision. This is how you truly "master" an opening, not just memorizing cxd5 in this line, exd5 in that one.
The book does a good job of this in a few places, it repeatedly highlights how after Nd4 you should play Rb1/b4 to yank away the defending c5-pawn, and draws the reader's attention to the Bxh3/Nf3+ tactic. But I would like to see things like this more explicitly laid out.
Kosten's book does a good job of this in many places as he explains some common pawn structures and the features of those pawn structures, common tactical patterns, and the strategies for both sides. My guess is that most people who read Kosten's book remember all that stuff and don't remember the theory as much.
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Chessable Botvinnik English (Read 14156 times)
