LEARNING the CHESS OPENINGS: For intermediate levels of play

(Kindle) book description :
In the 'royal game' of chess, an understanding of all the phases of the game is important, namely, the opening, middle game, and the endgame. While the importance of the opening phase often is overestimated by beginners, at higher levels it can make the difference between a win and a loss. This book first guides the beginner through the labyrinth of the many different opening variations, recommending only some carefully selected, important openings. There-after the more advanced, chess 'club' players are shown how to develop a specialized opening set of opening variations, which is called a chess opening 'repertoire'. With such a 'repertoire', the number of options during the opening phase is reduced; and by reducing the time required to study openings, one can allocate more time to the study of other elements in chess, such as tactics (!), positional understanding or the endgame. Several opening choices, found with top computer programs are given. For more advanced players, 1.d4 is added for White as a positional repertoire the French defense against 1.e4, and some gambits for White. The almost perfect/computer-checked repertoire in this book thus gives an additional and very solid repertoire, thereby acquiring a broader knowledge of opening theory as a whole. Many improvements in modern chess opening theory ('novelties') are given to illustrate this choice. With a top chess engine and our own opening book we achieved a number one standard ranking end Dec. 2010 on the Internet Chess Club (ICC) and stayed in the top-three there ever-since. Author: J.E.F. ('Jef') Kaan, originally a physicist, is an ICCF correspondence chess player at master level. He has experience of more than twenty years in computer chess and opening-'book' preparation. He also invented the chess program 'Book-builder', which, together with other programs, was used to develop the content of this book.