Thank you both for your helpful replies ..read more

I suppose it's easier to study openings from Youtube videos or online courses than strategy - that would be my working hypothesis as to why books increasingly skew towards the latter ..read more

Historical bits about 7...cxd4 8. Nxd4 Qb6: it was "!? N" in the first NIC Yearbook 40 years ago, played by GM Hans Ree against IM Cornelis van Wijgerden in the 1983 Dutch championship. VW played 9. Qd2, and there was a note about 9. Be2. But I see that it was played in a game Gelfer-McKay from the 1969 world student team championship, which saw 9. a3 ..read more

Thanks to all who responded for their insightful and amusing comments! Dink - "Yoof" is a great term, and like cathexis I'll borrow it to say that I agree it's different with the yoof of today. My nephews and nieces are nice kids, and I seem to recall that they liked to read books while in grade school. However, that changed once they got their phones. Your son's ability to develop his chess skills without books reminds me a bit of the story about Capablanca doing something similar, which was the subject of a thread in this forum: https://www.chesspub.com/cgi-bin/chess/YaBB.pl?num=148157248 ..read more

Youtube and Chessable are certainly likely suspects. Youtube is wildly popular with all the scholastic players I meet, up to a level of say 1400. By contrast I have never once heard anybody, scholastic or adult, mention Chessable in conversation. What I read on the chess.com forums is that opening study consists of looking at an "opening explorer" (tree of variations) to find the opponent's likely move, then looking at the engine's top choice for one's own reply. It's certainly a logical approach. Whether an inexperienced player will get far with that is a separate question from whether it's ..read more

Thanks, Tony! The topic is back and in its proper place ..read more

(historical notes) After 1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 d6 3. Nc3 Nbd7 4. e4 e5, I see (in the non-subscriber material) that Nigel Davies indicates 5. d5 as the "main problem"/"key issue" with Black's move order. That took me back to NIC Yearbook 5 from 1986, in which a game between Tony Miles and IM Bernd Stein was highlighted. "In this opening, White's traditional plan is to develop his king's bishop to e2 or g2 and maintain the tension in the centre as long as possible, but Miles snapped his fingers at this 'tradition' in a game against Stein where he played the very unusual 5. d5 and got a good position ..read more

For what I know, if white follows 7.Nb3 7...Qb4+ 8.Bd2 Qb6 and 7...Qd8 Nd4 Are just straight draws so gotta mind who you're playing this against. 7...Qc7 8.Qd2 Nf6 9.Nc3 Normally white would have to worry about Ng4 at some point, but with the queen on c7 Bf4 will set up c5 and greatly nullify the whole manouvre. Besides that there is of course 7...Qd8 8.Nc3 Where black ought to take on c3, if the queen isn't proveked to d2 early, the essential Ng4 resource will again get stifled. Certainly need to handle these lines with care. I'm not sure where 7...Qd8 8.Qd2 Nf6 9.Nc3 Ng4 leads, but on a vi ..read more

Go figure! I too found a copy on Internet Archive (I know you might not approve) and noodled around using the same tools on whether it would be do-able and worth it. I got well over a hundred pages into it by a very laborious process, but that did not bring over any of the vital illustrations with it. Also, the formatting of the book(sort of half-page double-column text) was the devil to work with and basically doubled the pagination. So, with my limited skills, perhaps do-able. But your follow-up post confirms to me this Sysiphean labor is best put aside ..read more

Suetin (1980) Typische Fehler -- saved the bare PGN to Google Drive and the link is in the attachment. I've read over the whole book in my poor German, and translated about 20 percent of it in translate.google.com. I haven't seen anything looking like what I want so I am giving up on this one and switching to one of the other suggested books shortly ..read more