My First Chess Opening Repertoire for Black: A Ready-to-go Package for Ambitious Beginners

by Vincent Moret

Every chess player needs to decide which openings he or she is going to play. But where do you start? The risk of drowning in the turbulent sea of chess opening theory is only too real for beginning amateurs.Often your goals and ambitions will be misguided. If you are trying to win in 20 moves, copy what's in fashion among top-GM's or memorize variations, you are wasting your time. Most likely you will never get to play your 'preparation' and end up aimlessly switching from one opening to the other. After the success of his volume for White, experienced French chess trainer Vincent Moret now provides a complete, ready-to-go chess opening repertoire for Black. It consists of a sound set of lines that do not outdate rapidly, do not require memorization and are easy to digest for beginners and post-beginners.To show the typical plans and the underlying ideas in the various lines of his repertoire, Moret not only selected games of Grandmasters. He also uses games of young, improving players to highlight the errors they tend to make.

Genres: Chess

680 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 28, 2017

Reviews

[Josh Sherman · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was already about 1900 Elo over the board when I picked this up, as I had been struggling with black. I think this is a solid repertoire — particularly the decision to go with the Scandi as the main response to 1.e4. However, I do wonder why Moret chooses the Albin + the Dutch Stonewall as a response to d4 when both could be replaced with the Classical Dutch, which I have slotted into my repertoire instead.

To be honest, the Albin seems difficult to play at the 2000 level at best, and dodgy at worst. There are some critical lines where white plays an immediate nbd2 > nb3 to hit d4 quickly, and the book does not spend enough time addressing these kinds of lines, which are increasingly popular. Instead, he focuses on the g3 lines that are, admittedly, easier to play for black — but you won't see too many white opponents who go down this path these days. Basically, having to book up on the Albin and the Dutch stonewall seems counter to the rest of the book, which is all about efficient opening choices (hence the Scandi). Still, this is a great book for explaining the general ideas of the openings, and it's nice to actually have lower-rated club games included, as these are the types of moves you're likely to encounter at the below-master level.

I'd recommend this book if you're struggling with the black pieces in particular, and I'd supplement it with "Smerdon's Scandinavian."