? Has anyone read it yet? Any comments, good or bad?

I have read it. I thought it was well written, but I have a really hard time getting motivated to study openings. I frequently wonder when playing someone who rattles through the first several moves without thought, exactly how much do they understand? Sure, they are making the right moves. Oftentimes better moves than me. But, wrote memorization seems to defeat the whole 'fun' and even 'spirit' of chess. I am always amused when I enter the middle game feeling at a huge disadvantage, but still end up winning.

I have been playing with Bookup the past couple of weeks and it is an interesting program from a purely nerd perspective. It is fascinating to see the database work he has done with that program. I exported all the Queen's Gambit Accepted games I could find in Chessbase as PGN, imported them into Bookup, then had it perform its backsolving. In about half an hour I had a great QGA training medium. I could crank through all the variations and probably be as good as the next hack on the block at playing the opening, but I wouldn't understand it.

Bookup does have some eBooks that purport to take you through all of the variations with detailed annotation. I haven't done that yet, but will probably give it a try. If I found something that really caught the feeling of how I want to actually learn, rather than memorize chess, and applied it to the opening theory in an instructive manner, I would be able to improve my game immeasureably. I will be interested to see how this site deploys its opening training as well.

One comment I will make about the now released free eBooks that was a little bit of a letdown was the format. Even before this site was launched there has been all kinds of buzzing from you guys about your exciting 'Action Book' format. I was kind of hoping the free eBooks would be in that format so they could serve as a bit of a sampler of things to come. I was pretty surprised when they not only were not Action Books, but they were each in a different format.

I thought the content was good, but having it as a PDF didn't make it particularly easy to read online. Just an ordinary web page is better. The main advantage of eBooks for chess is that you don't have to get a set out to play though the games - you just click, but this book doesn't have any games in. Maybe it would be better as an ordinary book ?

Hi.

Thanks for the book, I have read your book and liked it very much and will try to adopt many of yours ideas into my practice.

There is one method one may find in other books with this topic, this is to find a strong player that suit your style and copy his reportuare. Since you don't mention this could you tell us what you think of this method. I'm not talking of copying players like Morozewitch and his like, even though all have to like his style, but players like Anand, Sutovsky, Kramnik, Karpov etc. Eg. players with a helthy reportuare even for lower rated players. With this said, I personaly follow your advice to use reportuare books for this. Still you can find your follower like Khalifman's White/Black according too ... Currently I use Khalifman's 'White according to Kramnik' (5 books) for my White reportuare and 'Chess Opening for Black, Explained' by Alburt/Dzindzichashvili/Perelshteyn for my Black reportuare. I don't try to memorize variations but use them to look up the theorie after the game to extend one move at the time. For the Black reportuare I also have some of Dzindzichashvili's DVD to make it entertaining to learn ideas.

In the chapter 'Practice with the real thing' I see you hinting to use books for help when playing against computers and on the Internet. I have to say that if I learned that my opponent on the Internet did use any kind of outside help, books, notes, computer, other player, etc. I would be very annoyed and most certainly put him on my 'noplay list'. For myself I do belive this is a 'bad' method to learn openings too and would not use it against a computer neither. Thinking back for what you remember of openinganalyses, what is nailed into you memory is the lines you played in a real game and did some analyses of afterwards. I see that you too think it is best to not use books but should wish you removed the sentence with hinting to use books on Internet play.

Maybe I missed a chapter on how to prepare for a tournament. What I do is to collect as many games I find by my expected opponents and check these game against my reportuare to fresh it up in those variations. On a lower level it could be har to find many games but a lot are put up on the internet from lower rated tournaments too. I keep my database of those games online on the Intenet (http://norbase.sjakk.biz/) so any player with the same playing area as me (Norway) can take advantage of it. Then I try to create an 'openingbook' for a playingprogram with these games as input, and practice against it. In addition I use a selfmade program(*) to practice/memorize openings where I keep my hole reportuare and add moves I could expect to be playing in the tournament to a copy of my reportuare. Any thought on when this work should be done (for an amateur), I have read somewhere that it should be made 1-2 weeks before a tournament (the last week is for tactics).

Odd Gunnar Malin

(*)
If anyone want to checkout the program, I have put it up at http://polarchess.sjakk.biz/. It is a playingprogram that extend in dirction of learning and is still in 'beta'. Basicly the opening memoriazion feature works much like Bookup where you mark your reportuare moves and the machine answer with a random move from the book.