Since I am going to use GM Bogdan Lalic's The Grünfeld for the Attacking Player to illustrate some typical faults a repertoire book can have, I should in fairness make some compensating remarks. First, as with other Batsford productions, it is well produced, with high standards of editing and typesetting. Moreover, at the time it was written, there was a definite gap in the literature of this opening, and as a reference book, it is undoubtedly useful. I myself check new Grünfeld games against Lalic's book as well as my databases. I would also point out that Lalic's excellent recent work, The Budapest Gambit (Batsford 1998), appears to be a much more careful and far better-researched book (his treatment of the line I play, for example, was extensive and accurate); so the problems I list below, although they are typical of many opening books, do not apply to this author's work in general.

Lalic makes it explicit that he is writing a Black-point-of-view book, with an emphasis on the second player obtaining winning chances. His method of presentation is the illustrative game, with sidelines given in notes. This contrasts with Emms (who uses the traditional tree structure), and corresponds in principle to what B+P do. But in fact, Burgess and Pedersen take almost obsessive care to list all of Black's serious options versus the White repertoire they are suggesting. I consider this a strength of their book because, if you play a game over the weekend and return to find out why the proposed system didn't work for you, the exact move order is very likely to be found with an example, or at least a suggestion. Lalic's presentation is much looser; he seems to mention the lines he is most interested in, or has a nice example for, but omits other important variations. In an earlier review, I identified this as a danger of the illustrative-game approach, i.e., that one can skip lines too easily. As an example (and there are others below), the first Grünfeld I glanced at for this review was in a recent magazine and began 1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 g6 3.Nc3 d5 4.cxd5 Nxd5 5.e4 Nxc3 6.bxc3 Bg7 7.Be3 c5 8.Qd2 Qa5 9.Rc1. This formerly popular move is not as frequently seen as 9.Rb1, since the ending after 9.Rc1 cxd4 10.cxd4 Qxd2+ 11.Kxd2 is supposed to be okay for Black. But when I was studying this line about a year ago, I noticed a correspondence game that seemed promising for White, especially when I did some independent analysis. So I wanted to see what Lalic said: alas, 9.Rc1 itself is missing from the book! At least, one would think that Grünfeld players would need to know how to play the Black side. Okay, it happens. Then I thought I'd compare the overlap between Burgess and Pedersen's book and Lalic's. B+P (who had access to Lalic's book) recommend the above variation for White, but with 9.Rb1 b6 10.Bb5+ Bd7 11.Bd3!?, and quote various games from 1992 to 1997. Lalic doesn't even mention 11.Bd3 at all.

Next, I checked the line I myself have played for years as White, 7.Nf3 (instead of 7.Be3 above) 7...c5 8.Rb1 0-0 9.Be2, which is probably the "main line" of the Grünfeld in contemporary practice. Here I found a number of problems. First, like too many authors, Lalic apparently adds no analysis whatsoever of his own to this chapter. Yet the reader has no way of knowing this, since he fails to attribute any of the dense notes to every game, although they are copied wholesale from Informant! These include notes by lesser masters as well as the likes of Shirov, Kramnik, and Leko. It is irritating and misleading to steal analysis in this fashion, and the reader has no idea if Lalic is just throwing out some ideas or whether this is the in-depth analysis of a player who actually played the game. Worse (from the point of view of forming a repertoire), the games cited in many variations come from 1994 and 1995, but the critical, tactically-based lines in those games were overturned by improvements which appeared well before Lalic's book was published. In fact, some of these improvements were listed in the same Informants from which he draws his games! This lack of research does a disservice to the reader, especially since many of these improvements are for the White side.

Then there are the gaps. In the main line after 9.Be2 cxd4 10.cxd4 Qa5+, for example, Lalic doesn't even mention 11.Qd2, which is not only the move a club player would tend to play (to protect the a-pawn), but it has a large body of games by top-level GMs behind it and requires very careful and accurate defense by Black. In most of the main games with 11.Bd2 Qxa2, furthermore, he curiously omits well-established moves for White, even though those are the ones that the player of Black needs to know about. All this might not be so bad had the author provided his own insight into the variations given. But at least in this material I looked at, several of the lines presented for Black are subject to rather easy improvements by White; in general, one feels that the author hasn't given much personal attention to the games. Overall, then, this chapter ends up being a jumble of misleading games with poor guidance.

My point is certainly not to denigrate this particular book, which is in any case a useful introduction to the Grünfeld for Black, or Lalic, who, as mentioned, has already avoided repeating these problems in his latest work. He writes well and instructively, and will certainly produce more fine books in the future.

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