Soltis Andy. Grandmaster Secrets: Openings

Davenport: TIrinkers' Press Inc., 2000. — 243 p. — ISBN: 0-938650-68-8.Nothing Like It In Chess Opening Literature!
If you want to score a lot of points when playing chess against good opponents you'll have to know how to play the opening well any books have been written to convey this concept and, with few exceptions, using them has often been unsatisfying and sheer drudgery often with old examples and writing lacking any great inspiration, direction, or usefulness.Welcome to Grandmaster Secrets: Openings by NY Grandmaster and well-known chess author, Andrew Soltis. The "safe" not only contains the pearls of chess rewards (money, trophies, and chess antiquities), but also the pearls of wisdom, subjects seldom or never touched upon in those venerable tomes of chess "education."Using a Socratic teacher-student approach in the characters of GM Noah Tall, and Pat Sayre, the topic of this aspect of chess centers around the subjects of materialism, give and take, myths, difficulties, picking and choosing, rules, decisions, de-booking, and many more - dealt with from a veteran chess grandmaster's perspective.An illustrative way is used so that everyone can grasp the concepts quickly; to improve in a shorter amount of time. Charts, graphics, and modern games in algebraic notation will add to your enjoyment and a faster learning of the preliminary phase of chess. Volume 1 was Grandmaster Secrets: Endgames.The opening phase is the easiest part of the game to play-if all you want to do is get to the middlegame.
It's easy because it's the one part of a game in which you can rely on someone else's ideas, if not their exact moves.
Secondly, it's the one phase that you can learn and immediately apply what you've studied.
If you spend a weekend on the rudiments of the French Defense, for example, you can put them to work the next time someone opens 1. e4.
In contrast, if you study the minority attack, or a tactic such as smothered mate, it may take dozens of games before you can use what you've learned.
(And the endgame is worse: I was already an International Master before I won a Bishops-of-opposite-color ending.)
But while the opening is easy to play-if all you want to do is start the middlegame-it's very hard to play well.And that's not surprising when you look at the literature these days. I wonder how any amateur can make sense of the endless analysis, dumbed-down generalizations and just plain bad writing of opening books. Chess players love to learn-but they hate being taught, especially if it's done that way.This book is based on the premise that there is another way-that good.