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Product Details
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Product Description
Product Description
* The perfect survival guide to the chess openings
* All openings covered
* Detailed verbal explanations of plans for both sides
* Up-to-date and featuring many tips and recommendations
* Insights into the 'character' of each opening
* Written by one of the world's foremost opening experts
The first moves of a chess game define the nature of the whole struggle, as both players stake their claim to the critical squares and start to develop their plans. It is essential to play purposefully and to avoid falling into traps or reaching a position that you don't understand.
This is not a book that provides masses of variations to memorize. Paul van der Sterren instead offers a wealth of ideas and explanation, together with the basic variations of each and every opening. This knowledge will equip players to succeed in the opening up to good club level, and provide a superb grounding in opening play on which to build a more sophisticated repertoire. The strategies he explains will, unlike ever-changing chess opening theory, remain valid as long as chess is played, and so the time spent studying this book will be rewarded many times over.
About the Author
Grandmaster Paul van der Sterren has won the Dutch Championship on two occasions, and in 1993 reached the Candidates stage of the World Chess Championship. He is an internationally renowned chess writer and editor: he was one of the founding editors of New in Chess, for whose Yearbooks he has contributed more than 150 opening surveys.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
4.4 out of 5 stars (19 customer reviews)
83 of 85 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Outstanding, Nov 22 2009
By Goosemeyer - Published on Amazon.com
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: FCO: Fundamental Chess Openings (Paperback)
Without a doubt this is the best opening book to start with, and possibly the only one you might need for quite a while. Oh how I wish this had been available when I started out. What's the first thing a beginner does (ignoring all advice)? He starts surveying all the openings to find a few that he likes (and then changes his mind repeatedly). Before this book that involved buying a book on each opening, at great expense, both of money and time. That's no longer necessary - you can buy this one and get all you need for that purpose. It does expect some experience, but no more than any opening book does.The book reminds me alot of Watson's Mastering the Chess Openings, except that it's much broader and less deep. It's far less selective and sophisticated than Watson, but it's not superficial at all given the target audience. It gives very good explanations of the general themes, historical development, and early move orders of pretty much every opening you could want, although it does have a strong focus on mainlines. For a beginner or intermediate, this book will give you enough theory to get started - your first half dozen moves with some deviations - but not enough to distract you from tactics and endgames. Coaches should love it. I'm sure they would tell you it's all you need until you are an expert.
The book is targeted at non-Masters. It's perfect for beginners to intermediates - I would say this is an essential book for beginner to Class C. Higher class players would still get a lot of value as a reference for unfamiliar openings they encounter and for broadening their repertoires, but I suspect an Expert would get diminished value from it. It has 450 some pages of large page size and has a huge amount of prose for each bit of analysis.
I bought this expecting to be disappointed by superficiality, but I was wrong. After the fact, it's hard to imagine this book hasn't existed until now. Thank you Grandmaster van der Sterren. Thank you Gambit.
Update: I find myself immersed in this thing all the time - it's addictive. I defy anybody in the target audience to read about their favorite opening and not learn something.
55 of 56 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
A modern version of "The ideas behind the chess openings", Nov 30 2009
By Chess amateur - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: FCO: Fundamental Chess Openings (Paperback)
This book is a miracle. It's fills a gap between more simple opening encyclopedia like Seirawan's "Winning chess openings", Collins "Understanding the chess openings" and specific opening books. This book is in fact a modern and a more advanced version of Ruben Fines "The ideas behind the chess openings". And lower rated chess players (below 1800) should understand the chess opening plans, rather than memorizing openings.Many chess players (improvers and club players) have bought a book on a given opening, for later find that opening not suitable for them, a waste of money. So in the beginning of your chess career, you should instead buy only one book.
This book!
As an example, this book will probably give you the same introduction and plans in the Sicilian opening, as Emms "Starting Out-The Sicilian", "Fundamental chess openings" contains almost 60 pages with plans and information about the Sicilian opening. That's more than enough for player rated below 1800.
Strongly recommended!
45 of 47 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Say goodbye to shelves of chess books, Dec 2 2009
By revbd - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: FCO: Fundamental Chess Openings (Paperback)
This book is outstanding in every way (apart from the awful 'FCO' title) and provides substantial coverage of ALL chess openings. It addresses both understanding and specific moves and gives lots of unusually well written explanation. In addition it is, I think, superior to comparable alternatives. For example: Watson is far less comprehensive (despite 4 vols), has big gaps e.g. Petroff, and his coverage is both uneven and less practical; Djuric et al is far less deep (despite 4 vols); Collins, though good and comprehensive, is considerably shorter and less focused on understanding; Kallai, though good, is focused primarily on moves; Fine is hopelessly out of date and, in addition, not good. Sterren's opening book is a marvel which makes shelves of my introductory opening titles redundant.
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