My eBook (Openings)

by Don Lester, Tuesday, July 19, 2005, 06:22 (7455 days ago) @ Tony Kosten

? 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.