Funny Opening Book

Originally posted by gaychessplayer
I suppose one could argue that adopting an opening repertoire from a book that is grossly incomplete is better than not having a repertoire at all. My suggested alternative, though, would be to learn a more solid opening like the Caro-Kann if your prep-time is limited. If you play a super-sharp opening like the Dragon without knowing a ton of specif ...[text shortened]... as opposed to what you would need to know to face all of White's choices against the Sicilian.)

With openings...you don't really need to memorize all the lines...experience and knowing the ideas are good...plus having good tactical abilities and general opening knowledge.

Originally posted by tomtom232
With openings...you don't really need to memorize all the lines...experience and knowing the ideas are good...plus having good tactical abilities and general opening knowledge.

It all depends on the opening. In general I used to go in planning to play

1. c4 2. g3 3. Bg2 4. Nc3 and probably go into a botvinik setup (add pawns on d3 and e4 and 0-0. I played the middlegame well and became a class B player like that. It isn't enough against players who are 1700+ so I took up 1. e4 in an attempt to make myself more aggressive. Now, I know general ideas, but had I gone into a tournament ready to play the fried liver without extensive knowledge I would probably be crushed. The dragon is even worse. However I still play the french in the same way I played the english, with some general ideas and it usually gets me by.

Originally posted by !~TONY~!
I stumbled across this book on NIC that is titled "An Aggressive Opening Repertoire for the Club Player".

Actually I own this book in Russian and found it quite useful. Frankly I started using it when I had no opening repertoire at all. This book doesn't try to give full analysis of course. It contains two parts: for white and for black. So if you are playing white it will suggest just one option in any given position, then will show few possible responses for black and then again just one continuation for white in each line. That's pretty straightforward. Now I start looking into other books that analyse each opening in detail but still find myself going back to this one from time to time.