James Mansson’s Chess Blog

One interesting piece of advice I have come across more than once, which relates to creating an opening repertoire, is to use a particular player as your model. The idea is that they player has already done the hard work of constructing the repertoire, so we are not starting from scratch, but rather working with something that has been shown to work. This of course relies on picking the right player, as not all players’ repertoires are well worked out; also, some repertoires may simply be unsuitable if the openings are not to our taste or require more theoretical work than we are prepared to do. Over the years, there have been more than one effort to do this, with varying results.

The first chess opening repertoire book I bought was An Opening Repertoire for the Attacking Player by Raymond Keene and David Levy. This presented a wild and woolly collection of systems for the “Attacking Player” for both White and Black. The White repertoire was based on 1 e4 and consisted of a series of sharp, offbeat systems, while the Black repertoire was based on the Pirc Defence and Benko Gambit. While superficially attractive, closer examination showed some problems with the systems recommended, so apart from the Pirc Defence, which I played for about a year before taking up something more suitable, I did not employ any of the lines in a serious game.

It is a while ago now, but I think the first endgame textbook I bought was Practical Chess Endings by Paul Keres. I certainly went through the first chapter (“Elementary Endings”, which includes the less-than-elementary mate with Bishop and Knight), but I only had a fairly perfunctory look at the rest. The problem was that the author was attempting to be systematic and fairly comprehensive, but this didn’t reflect the strict relevance of the content. This difficulty was evident from the first chapter, where some genuinely essential material (mating with a Queen or Rook against a bare King, and key pawn endgames) was mixed with scenarios that rarely occur in practice (King and two minor pieces against a bare King). Other endgame textbooks I subsequently looked at suffered from the same issue.