An Opening Repertoire for the Attacking Player

This book is a reasonable attempt to piece together an opening repertoire that on the one hand is aggressive, but on the other hand does not require 100's of hours of preparation time.I actually used the variations suggested in this book for a period of about 2.5 years in actual tournament play. I had very decent results (I am currently rated around 1800 USCF).The lines selected are fairly forcing and unbalanced. There are a few places where the book is somewhat weak. I noted the same problems as one of the other reveiwers in the section on the pirc/modern defense. (There is a game that leaves you hanging in a terrible position, but seems to imply that you winning - it makes no sense at all. In fact, the side they are trying to convince you to play ends up losing very badly in the actual game.)Other than that, I must say that the authors really have done a decent job of trying to "fit" a repertoire within the parameters ascribed.I would estimate that it only took me around 5-10 hours to play over all of the games and footnotes in the book. I remembered them fairly easily, and went on to win a very respectable number of games.I would recommend the book to players rated between around 1400 to around 1800. I don't feel that there are enough notes for players below around 1400 to really understand why certain moves are made. For players over 1800, much deeper preparation than this book provides would be required.In particular, I have had incredible results with the openings chosen from the black side. They are openings that I would not have even considered playing had I not read this book. (Scandinavian and Chigoran).There are better, there are much worse. This is not a bad addition to your library.

This book taught me how to prepare an opening repertoire. First I adopted all the suggested opening lines for black and white, and then I improved and accommodated them to my own playing style. It is a book I consult regularly. Although I bought this book in 1997, I still keep on reading it. It is a very good book.

This book is an attempt to create an opening repetoire for the developing player which does not require hours and hours of study, yet provides the aggressive player with reasonable attacking chances.In my opinion, the author succeeds for the most part. It is very difficult for a book this size to provide a complete discussion of the nuances in each of the opening systems presented. The approach in the book is to open each chapter with some "light talk" about the variation chosen, followed by a few representative master level games.Players rated below 1300-1400 may not have developed the requisite skills to understand the material presented, while players rated above 1800-1900 will find that the book doesen't cover the variations in enough detail to fully prepare them face opponents rated 2000+.Like most chess books, there are a few typos, but in general I feel that this book is a good value for a player fitting the attacking profile rated 1400-1800.