Play 1 e4 e5!: A complete repertoire for Black in the Open Games

I find myself getting in trouble against 1. e4 when I try to play one of the semi-open defenses, especially against better players, and against booked-up 13-yr-olds who have nothing better to do with their time than memorize chess openings. The Sicilian is WAY too theoretical for someone who has little time to memorize openings, and there seems to be a critical testing line that you just have to know against every variation. The Pirc has the Austrian attack, Alekhine's the four-pawns, and the French defense is, well, the French defense! So I've opted for 1... e5 for some time now with reasonable success. I find as I play better and better opponents that I need to know more and more about the openings to escape them with my life, and that it is definitely counterproductive to burn too much time on my clock figuring it out over the board. This book attracted me because of the lines proposed. I play two knights and king's gambit declined with 2... Bc5 (although I wonder why the same setup isn't proposed against the Vienna game), etc.This book has good points and bad. First of all, it's figurine algebraic, which I've always found annoying, but then what isn't these days? (A minor point!:) Second, it is a "typical" opening book, with notes packed full of variations and very little in the way of explanation (although some). That might be fine for master-level players, which unfortunately I am not. On the positive side, the book presents complete games, so that it's possible to watch the opening evolving into a middle game and even an ending. However, for that purpose, there are relatively few of them. The entire gamut of the open games is covered in just 65 illustrative games, making it essential to wade through what are sometimes very detailed variations in the notes.In addition, a few of the variations suggested are just (in my opinion) crazy! There is just no way in the Scotch that I am giving myself two sets of doubled pawns (one isolated), especially when the queens are off the board and we are headed for an endgame. Once again, a master or a GM may be comfortable with that, and maybe someday I will be, too, but I'm an old guy and I don't know that I'm going to live that long!!Bottom line, the book is about as complete as you can expect for one that is less than 200 pages, but it is dense and definitely not written for class B players. I've found it useful for looking things up, but I have better resources for that. Players of my modest level would be better off with annotations that explain the ideas and themes behind the openings, rather than annotations densely packed with the likes of (just opening the book at random), "After 5 0-0 Be7 6 d3 Black can reach similar positions to those in which White plays 9 a4, covered in Chapter 3. There can follow 6...b5 7 Bb3 d6 8 a4 Bd7 9 c3 0-0 10 Re1 Na5 11 Bc2 c5 with easy equality, for example 12 Nbd2 Qc7 (or 12...Re8 13 Nf1 h6...", and it goes on (page 86, game 30, sub Ruy Lopez). Unfortunately, I have nothing to recommend in its place. IMs and GMs are always telling us that we should study ideas and not memorize variations, but... then we are presented with opening repertoire books like this one! Hello?

I have had Play e4 e5! in hand for about three months and it has become one of my favorite chess books. I have periodically replied to 1. e4 with e5 in my 30 years of serious chess, but the vast majority of my games as black against 1. e4 have been Center-Counter (aka Scandinavian) (1. e4 d5), Sicilian (1. e4 c5) or Pirc/Modern (1. e4 d6). My reasoning has always been that 1. e4 e5 is "giving White what he wants," that is at my below-Master level a chance to play a sharp gambit. I just never felt comfortable playing against the celebrated King's Gambit, and it seemed that other gambits also required a lot more study time than I wanted to use to meet them. Of course, the Ruy Lopez is an enormous complex unto itself.Since I like and respect Grandmaster Nigel Davies for his "Power Chess" books and his fine Chess Improver blog [...] I thought I would give this book a go, partly based on the other, positive reviews. I am very glad I did.Play 1. e4 e5! is a complete repertoire against 1. e4, with the exception (as others have noted) of Alapin's Opening (1. e4 e5 2. Ne2). I don't consider this much of an omission, since it probably gets played in about .1% of e4 e5 games. To be completely thorough, also not covered here are unusual second moves for white like 2. a3, g3 and c4. These do get trotted out occasionally, mostly at below-master level, and it's not a bad idea to have replies prepared for these rare moves. Some coverage can be found at the beginning of John Emms'  Play The Open Games As Black  which I think is a good book, but not as directly useful for me as the Davies. Emms' book, published in 2000, is in the bibliography of Play 1. e4 e5! and is cited in the text as well, but the repertoire there is more complicated (e.g. King's Gambit Accepted) and it doesn't touch on the Ruy. You have to get a whole different book for that.The final difference is one referenced in my title for this review. A great strength of Davies' book is that it has 65 main, annotated COMPLETE games (plus more in the notes), and the annotations don't end after the opening. The author comments on various turning points throughout the games (in 14 of which he was the player of the black pieces) and close study of these games can improve your play in all phases. This is what puts Play 1. e4 e5! a cut above many other good opening books.

I've had this for a few months, using it to improve my skill in open games and as a reference. I've given it a lot of use. Objectively it's a good book, but it's not getting the job done, which is a pity because there's no alternative on Kindle.It's not particularly well-organized. There's no over-all variation tree. There's no option to click to Table of Contents (which is just chapter headings anyway, in a book where "second move alternatives to Nf3" are all one chapter), and "go to Cover" and "go to Beginning" are the same link (to the cover). You can do a lot of jumping around in trying to find your way in openings like the Bishop's Opening, the King's Gambit Declined (Davies' choice) and the Vienna, and the extra effort to deal with half-baked organization gets to be a drag.Since it doesn't teach play in the open games, the book stands or falls by its variations (even though it's organized by example games). Whether you like Davies' choice of variations is a matter of taste. Over time, I found myself not liking them. In an important line the defense to the main line Ruy Lopez points to a draw unless White deviates. (Of course this is not a problem if you are a grandmaster playing other grandmasters.) The defense to the Exchange Variation seems like something that generates "equals" rather than "slight edge to White" post-opening evaluations but has no coherence, or at least I couldn't see in what way Black was aiming at something other than "=". And so on. It felt like going through ECO picking lines that end in good symbols. Except that somebody else made the choices. And I don't like his choices.