Improve Your Opening Play

"Improve Your Opening Play" is an excellent FIRST book on openings for a beginner who knows all the basics, but needs a deeper understanding of the purpose of various openings. It will be particularly helpful for occasions when the beginner is white and is met by various popular openings that would put him or her at a disadvantage without some knowledge of the intent, strengths and weaknesses of the various approaches black can take. It will also give the beginning a player a variety of strategies for countering white. This can help a beginner to gain an edge on another beginner who is not familiar with a particular opening. From a pedagogical standpoint, this book provides a broad overview of each of the most important openings and their variations. This provides a framework for building on the basics and deeper study down the road. The immediate advantage is that the beginner will soon be able to recognize various openenings and avoid major mistakes. It will also give him the knowledge he needs to look up what someone else used against him and do further research. This book is NOT intended to be a comprehensive text on openings. As such, it is not overwhelming. It provides approximately 6-8 moves of each opening and variation, the simple logic behind these moves and the advantages and disadvantages of the resulting position. It also provides some questions as to how to proceed and encourages the reader to think on their own from there. I think this is a good way to go because it allows new players to learn the basics of the various openings quickly and then experiment on their own. This makes further study more meaningful and with real game experience advanced study will be more productive and beneficial. There is nothing like losing a game because of a bad opening due to lack of understanding to motivate one to learn more! I have several opening books and although I have been playing chess for a long time, sometimes I feel overwhelmed reading them. It is much more interesting for me to master general concepts and then build upon each of the major themes over time. This partly because I only have limited time to devote to the game and studying it. This is probably the boat most people are in. If you like chess, but are turned off by the density and apparent complexity of other openings book, this might be just right for you. Chris Ward writes in a simple, straightforward and conversational tone. This makes this text very readable and the major principles easy to digest. There are also lots of useful diagrams and he doesn't present so many moves between diagrams that it is difficult to memorize the board position. In short, this is an informative and enjoyable read. Lastly, while the book isn't exhaustive in its treatment of openings, it does provide some strategic guidelines as to how to continue. It doesn't give examples, but it encourages you to experiment with the position. I think this is a great approach in a worl

In "Improve Your Opening Play", Chris Ward gives a brief overview of the most popular and important openings, and succinctly explains the ideas behind them. Along the way, Ward will sometimes invite the reader to work on an exercise. These are usually pretty brief and fairly easy to solve, but they do help cement certain ideas that one should learn. The book is comprised of 7 sections: 1) Opening Fundamentals 2) Symmetrical e-pawn Openings 3) Other Defences to 1 e4 4) Symmetrical d-pawn Openings 5) Other Defences to 1 d4 6) Other Openings 7) Solutions to Exercises All of this information is covered in less than 150 pages, which is not enough to really go into any depth. However, for the beginning player who wants a basic understanding of a lot of different openings, the book is pretty good. There are plenty of diagrams throughout the text and Ward's straightforward writing makes the concepts easy to grasp. One caveat: Though this book is targeted towards beginners, it is not the first book a beginner should read. Rather, it is a good introduction to chess openings, made for the player who already has a reasonable grasp of basic chess play.

I am writing this review of Improve Your Opening Play because the other reviews leave a gap or two in explanation. In sum, this book is perfect for the absolute OPENING beginner -- and I don't mean CHESS beginner.If you're an opening beginner, when you go to the bookstore and see the various titles on openings, you may wonder, "What's the use of learning the Najdorf Variation of the Sicilian when my father's never gonna let me get more than 2 moves into it?"This book is for you. There are way too few books like Improve Your Opening Play, which accomodates the multitude of players who need to know the opening fundamentals before proceeding on to the much more detailed books on the market. Reuben Fine's book on the ideas behind the openings, of course, is also a good place to start, but this book is more up-to-date, a little "shorter and sweeter," very well organized, and presents its lessons in a visually simple and effective manner. The IDEAS underlying each move of every opening you are likely to see (an average of 6 to 8 moves out) are thoughtfully presented. The discussion also includes analysis of common variants to many of the more classic moves.In my opinion, GM Chris Ward, gives just the right amount of information to the new student of the openings, making opening study fun rather than overwhelming, and providing a solid foundation for more advanced study of any opening you may want to pursue. If you thoroughly study this book, when you see a particular opening in play, you will have a grasp of what you should be striving for as well as what your opponent is trying to do, and I, for one, have always felt that the THINKING in chess is what makes this great game fun -- not the memorization.

I like this book a lot, it is a brief synopsis of the overall idea of each of the major openings. Like a previous reviewer noted, it is strictly for beginners and will not teach you an opening. It will, however, give you the basic plan behind the opening and can be the starting point for study (after which you will want to get a dedicated opening book, most likely).If you look at it as The Ideas Behind the Chess Openings 'lite', you will not be far off. My only major complaint with this book is coverage of the Caro-Kann compared to some other openings. It's basically nonexistant, and you are left feeling a little short changed. The coverage of the Sicilian, on the other hand, is quite good (for a book of this type) mentioning both c3 and several forms of the open (the author is a dragon expert!).After you read this book, I think the ideas behind the chess openings should be your next book, for a little more detail, then probably choose one or two opening specific books -- the new 'Starting out' series by everyman would probably be a good choice for a novice player. As always, MCO (or NCO -- don't want to start a holy war) will be useful as reference material.In summary, this book is very good, but is only the first step; you will not find everything you need in this book, only a very broad overview.

I have read the book and it helped me a lot to improve my opening understanding. Chris has a very powerful technique for dealing with opening systems and he explains the important points very clearly, and easy to follow way. So, I recommend the book for the players who want to improve their understanding on the openings, especially Scilian and French defence. I am a 2000 rated player.