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Last update: Friday June 3, 2005 9:44
by Jacob Aagaard
Everyman, 144 pages, £13.99
It can't be easy for an author to write an "easy guide" to something inherently
difficult. Indeed it must be rather difficult. So I am intrigued by Everyman's
hope to provide "just enough detail and just enough explanation to enable the
reader to play an opening with confidence, without months of memorising theory"
This, we are told on the back of some of these books, is "the easy way to master
a chess opening".
Can mastery come this easy? Are we kidding ourselves if we think a complex opening system, which has taken decades to evolve and changes every month, can be absorbed by a new comer "the easy way"? I'm not sure, so I was very interested to look at an example of these books and see how it stood up to this aim.
The issue I start with is my own playing strength and opening experience, which I suspect is not typical of the target audience for these books. Thus I will do my level best to look at it with reference to what it is trying to achieve, rather than what I would want from it.
Not really knowing where to start, I have made four
parameters for assessing the merits of the author's work. These are:
1
Organisation of the material
2 Quality of explanation
3 Analytical
Accuracy (including care and research)
4 Originality (presentation or new
analysis)
I understand that these may not be the most appropriate tools, but they will at least get us going.
Jacob Aagaard's book is a very bold project. The Sveshnikov is perhaps the most complicated of all Sicilians because very early in the game there tends to be a clear imbalance between black's activity and white's positional plusses. The early conflict gives rise a good deal of sharp theory but there are also lines where the tension is left to rumble for a few moves while the players mobilise. So the author's task (unlike, say, in the Bg5 Najdorf) is indeed to provide detail and explanation, and I think Aagaard succeeds in doing this; not shirking from looking deeply into the theory of the main lines but setting up the stall of key ideas with an 18 page explanatory introduction. This part of the book is top class and the examples are well selected. Aagaard writes very well about "typical plans and structures", "piece placement" and "practical examples".
On the theoretical side of things I think Aagaard is also highly competent, but slightly less impressive. I don't know if this impression is relative to my own expectations and prejudices, or if players around club level would notice this too, but in general I get the feeling (as I did from his book on the Panov Botvvinik attack, also by Everyman) that Aagaard is somewhat enslaved by fashion and uncritical of conventional assessments. In the slightly off beat or dated lines I get the impression that he has looked at the prevailing assessment in an opening manual, noticed that it's not played at the top anymore, and concludes that it needs only minimal coverage, without checking if the solution to Black's problems is really is so self-explanatory.
For example in the second chapter on "silly sixth moves" he gives 1 e4 c5 2 Nf3 Nc6 3 d4 cd 4 Nxd4 Nf6 5 Nc3 e5 and then 6 Nf3 Bb4 and 6 Nb3 Bb4 as comfortable for Black which indeed they are, but he doesn't signify that …Bb4 is a very important move, without which these quieter knight moves are not so "silly" at all. I spent a long time trying to make 6 Nf5 work and it's not so far off in some positions. Even if Black is theoretically fine, I wouldn't feel comfortable playing these positions for the first time with Black, especially given that the explanatory text gives no indication of how to play these "equal" positions in general. More significantly he describes 6 Ndb5 d6 7 a4 as "truly harmless, but Black should know what to do about it" This is dangerous for the reader because it's not just a question of knowing the given moves, which in my opinion are not even the best for Black (I stopped playing this line for White because of 7…a6 8 Na3 Bg4!?), but of understanding a Sveshnikov position which has an entirely different nature from most of the main lines and in which Black can quickly become worse if White were to deviate from the given lines and pose fresh, though not theoretically testing problems. A further lack-lustre piece of work is his analysis of my game against Sutovsky, given on page 33 of the book. This position follows a very natural line of play after 7 Nd5 and is in many ways a critical position for the assessment of the variation. Aagaard gives 15 Be2 as dubious but I think he has not given the move any thought beyond the game continuation in which I performed badly. Both GM Sutovsky, and GM Michael Adams when using this game to prepare for me, considered 15 Be2 an excellent prophylactic move and a significant novelty. My intention was to play 16 f4! but I got confused somehow, assessing incorrectly the position after 16…gf 17 Bxf4 Ne5 18 c5 Ng6 19 Bxd6 Bxd6 20 ed Qxd6, when I missed that I could play 21 Qd4!. Adams felt that White may be slightly better after this, though it's nothing special, but Aagaard doesn't mention it at all.
Such slips are forgivable and given that the heart of the book is undoubtedly the variations after 7 Bg5, this is where we should pay most attention. The analysis of 9 Nd5 Qa5+ is quite good but strangely inconclusive. Since the play is very sharp it would have been good for players with both sides to know if best play after this move really is a draw. This is a very important question for the author to raise, even within an easy guide, and since it's one to which I would like an answer, I was disappointed that he doesn't do so! A further place where a conclusion would have been good is after 7 Bg5 a6 8 Na3 b5 9 Nd5 Be7 10 Nxe7!? Nxe7 11 Bxf6 gf 12 c4! This is a rather forcing line and although he gives a suggestion for a way in which Black might be equal, the main line, which I think most players would be inclined to choose, leads to an advantage for White. If you are going to give 12 c4 an exclamation mark in this line, it would be good to be more clear about its objective merits and future prospects. This applies to a later line too, namely 9 Nd5 Be7 10 Bxf6 Bxf6 11 c3 Ne7 12 Nxf6 gf. This is the main position in the tenth chapter and now he gives lots of moves most of which are fine for Black but after the obvious 13 Bd3 he gives what looks like fairly lazy and incomplete analysis. Yet there's no line in which he thinks Black is OK. If this is his view, he should state it explicitly because that would be antidote to the subject of the chapter (12…Ne7) and he shouldn't encourage his readers to play this line.
There is much more ground which could be covered. Although I don't know the line very well I have the impression that The Novosibirsk Variation (9 Bxf6 gxf6 11 Nd5 Bg7 12 Bd3) was well done, given my comparisons to some other sources. The positional lines with 9 Nd5 Be7 10 Bxf6 Bxf6 11 c3 are reasonably well dealt with to but occasionally the author gives the impression that he hasn't really thought things through very thoroughly. For instance if you look at Barua-Lalic on page 73 you will see no annotations and yet Bogdan spoke to me about this game, and stressed that he had to find more than five only moves, all difficult, to stay in the game. The fact that the game was a draw should not be too taken as an indication that the opening was equal, and yet again a position which is critcal for the whole chapter is passed by without comment by the author.
So in general I think this is a good book which will
help you to play the Sveshnikov. Indeed, it is one of the more accessible works
on the opening today. However, there are shortcomings, and I the author
under-achieved. My final assessments are these:
Organisation: 7/10 - A
difficult job in so few pages-but maybe some extraneous material in chapters
10-13.
Explanation: 7/10- An excellent overview and generally clear, but
there's lack of direction among competing lines which begs many questions.
Accuracy: 6/10- A few sweeping statements and lack of attention to detail
in places.
Originality: 6/10- The author doesn't bring anything unique to
the text and doesn't seem to have any particular love for the opening with
which to enthuse the reader. There is some useful original analysis though.
Reviewed by Jon Rowson