One of the classical rules of chess is that beginning players need to play double king pawn openings. Conventional wisdom holds that there is no better way to learn the value of a lead in development or King safety than by playing the positions reached after 1.e4 e5. Since this advice has been around seemingly forever one would think that there would be many general books on the subject, but they would be wrong.
PLAY THE OPEN GAMES AS BLACK (Gambit 2000) by John Emms and Mihai Marin s BEATING THE OPEN GAMES (Quality Chess 2008) are both excellent books but deal with 1.e4 e5 exclusively from Black s perspective. THE ALTERMAN GAMBIT GUIDE: WHITE GAMBITS (Quality Chess 2010) has some fine coverage on 1.e4 e5 gambits but covers many other openings and not all open games arising from double king pawn openings.
STARTING OUT: OPEN GAMES by Glenn Flear seems to be possibly the second ever general survey on 1.e4 e5 from both White and Black s point of view after the fine but dated UNDERSTANDING THE OPEN GAMES (RHM, 1980) by Soltis, Mednis, Peters and Hartston.
Flear, who has played the Black side of 1.e4 e5 throughout his career covers every opening after 1.e4 e5 except the Ruy Lopez as the table of contents shows:
Introduction to 1 e4 e5 7
1 The Quiet Italian 11
2 Two Knights Defence 35
3 Evans Gambit and Giuoco Piano 70
4 Four Knights Game 99
5 Scotch Game 123
6 Central Gambits 148
7 King s Gambit 166
8 Vienna Game 191
9 Other White Systems 215
10 Black Avoids 2...Nc6 Introduction 235
11 Philidor s Defence 245
12 Petroff s Defence 267
Index of Variations 307
Index of Complete Games 316
Flear presents his material with introductions to each opening, model games (68 heavily annotated ones in all) and summaries. The English Grandmaster writes clearly with plenty of explanatory prose accompanying the analysis. This helps STARTING OUT: OPEN GAMES to be useful to a wide level of playing strengths from 1600 on up.
