Lasha Janjgava's KING'S INDIAN & GRUNFELD: FIANCHETTO LINES devotes a great number of pages (320) to the superficially solid but extraordinarily difficult g3 lines in the King's Indian and Grunfeld Defenses. Apart from the detailed organization and a lack of verbiage (there is almost none of the latter), this book has a different approach than Hansen takes in his far superior THE NIMZO-INDIAN 4.e3 (click to see Watson's review of that book). Luckily for me, Hansen himself reviewed Janjgava's book in his ChessCafe column. He noticed that the author has two pages of analysis on his own suggestion of the potentially important move 13.b3 after 1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 g6 3.g3 Bg7 4.Bg2 d5 5.cxd5 Nxd5 6.Nf3 0-0 7.0-0 Nb6 8.Nc3 Nc6 9.e3 Re8 10.Re1 e5 11.d5 Na5 12.e4 c6

In fact, this forced me to partially revise my idea of the book. While reading through it, I had concentrated not upon the Grunfeld, but upon the details of various g3 lines in the King's Indian (which I played for twenty-five years; in fact, I used four major systems against the fianchetto lines). In doing so, I found very little that was new even in wide-open and critical positions. Very little appeared of what I had discovered through my own games and analysis. Without many suggestions or comments at all, the book read like an endless stream of game citations, ones whose results seemed to determine his ordering and evaluation of the variations involved, along with the assessments at the very end of game fragments. Sure, there are a lot of games to quote for such comprehensive material, but taking more time to analyze individual ones and/or adding more suggestions, however simple, would have greatly improved the book.

Now, having seen Hansen's review, I have to give Janjgava credit for doing at least once what I described as my author involvement test (to make original suggestions and investigate them at length). But Janjgava fails to do what Hansen so admirably succeeded in doing in his THE NIMZO-INDIAN 4.e3: to show suggested improvements or alternatives on nearly every page and in most variations. Thus I would say that he largely failed my above-mentioned author test.

This book is an assiduous organizational effort and arranges the material as well as one could wish, but at times I became numbed by game after game without notes or indication of where the players might have improved. Too often the author seemed to have disappeared into a void while the downloaded games took over the controls. Thus I would recommend KING'S INDIAN & GRUNFELD: FIANCHETTO LINES mainly as a reference book for specialists, with the hope that they will use their energies to see the material freshly and find their own ideas.

Also check out Bauer's and Donaldson's reviews of this book.