I must say that I expected the worst when I got this book in the mail. More opening surprises? More ways to shock and confuse (the blurb on the cover says: An arsenal of red-hot opening ideas to shock and confuse your opponent) the opponent (whatever happened to good chess? How about: Shock and confuse the opponent by playing well!)?

Ready to rip this book apart, I opened it up and suffered through something akin to alien abduction: two hours had magically vanished! Had I passed out? Was I carried to planets far beyond this mortal coil? No, an even more shocking explanation awaits us: I was absorbed in the contents of this book and didn't notice the time passing!

I guess my interest was due to the fact that I know very little about modern theory. Perhaps I really did want to shock and confuse my opponents! All I can say is, this book is actually an enjoyable way to catch up on some of modern theory's more esoteric discoveries.

Grading each line on soundness and surprise value, Burgess takes us through King's Gambits, Scotch Opening surprises, endless new developments in the Sicilian Defense, Caro Kann, French Defense, Queen's Gambit, English, King's Indian, Grunfeld, Benko Gambit, Nimzo-Indian, Tompowsky, and much, much more.

Some of the offered lines are more or less useless (as far as soundness goes), but many of the author's suggestions caught my eye since they reside in critical variations of main-stream theory. In fact, much of what Burgess tossed in actually shocked me, not because the moves were so brilliant, but because I should have been aware of their existence. For example, I had faced 1.Nf3 d6 2.d4 Nf6 3.c4 g6 4.Nc3 Bf5 against Kamran Shirazi on several occasions. The move examined in this book, 5.Ng5!, had never occurred to me! Another line that I was completely unaware of goes as follows: 1.e4 c5 2.c3 Nf6 3.e5 Nd5 4.Nf3 Nc6 5.Bc4 Nb6 6.Bb3 c4 7.Bc2 Qc7 8.Qe2 and now 8...g5!?.

The fact that so many other lines also caught me by surprise only shows that I'm no longer a real chess player. Nevertheless, if you're like me in that you have let theory slip through your grasp, this enjoyable little book may be the wake-up call you've been looking for! It's a fun read that offers lots of interesting ideas.

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