Soon Parted

As they say, "A fool and his money are soon parted."

And so, as someone interested in unorthodox openings and supportive of independent book publishing (self-, print-on-demand, small press), despite previously-given well-founded concerns, I took the leap and bought James Alan Riechel's Chess Openings: New Theory.

The good news is, there is a lot of creativity in those 30 pages. Well, there actually are only 25 pages of Introductions and analysis, as the author starts numbering at the title page. And most of the 10 chapter Introductions are a half-page of print and a half-page of white space. Did I mention that there is adequate white space in the layout?

First off is the York Opening, 1.c4 c5 2.Nc3 Nc6 3.Nd5!? Riechel give no indication as to where the name comes from – player, location, literary allusion – and for a few pages I thought that he might have been recalling the English children's nursery rhyme, since White's advance Knight soon gets booted 

Oh, The grand old Duke of York,
He had ten thousand men;
He marched them up to the top of the hill,
And he marched them down again.

And when they were up, they were up,
And when they were down, they were down,
And when they were only half-way up,
They were neither up nor down.

But, no. There are chapters on the York Benko, the York-Sandnes MacCutcheon variation in the French Defense. Since the last chapter, on the American Opening, 1.Nc3 c5 2.Nd5!? contains the Riechel Variation, perhaps the nomenclature is person-based after all. (I have not checked my complete run of Randspringer, Myers Openings Bulletin, and Kaissiber magazines, so perhaps the truth is somewhere in there.)

A few general comments.

Using a very-accessible online games database, ChessLab, I tested the "newness" of all of the lines, including the named "theoretical novelties". The "Ts" were usually "N", but most of the openings generally had been trod before (although not by masters, and not necessarily the complete lines the author gives).


The "Danish Gambit" line, as the author calls it (others might think: Center Game), 1.e4 e5 2.d4 Nf6!? is given the name the Alekhine Variation ("Black attacks e4 in the style of Alekhine"). I think the move dates back to Greco.


Brashly, 1.e4 e6 2.d4 d5 3.Nc3 c5!? ("An unrecognized move in an old, well-established line") is given the name "The French Gambit" by the author. At least a few people (i.e. those who bought The Marshall Gambit in the French and Sicilian Defenses, by Kennedy and Sheffield) attribute the line to Frank Marshall.

As a reviewer, I find myself in a peculiar dilemma: if I quote as much analysis as I usually did in past reviews at Chessville, I will wind up quoting whole chapters of Chess Openings: New Theory. Where does "fair use" cross over into "copyright infringement"? (The whole book would have made a decent contribution to an issue of Gary Gifford's Unorthodox Opening Newsletter.)

Plus, it probably will not matter. If you are a great fan of junk openings, you will probably want the book, even if it mostly sits on your shelf after one reading. If you are not a fan, you probably have not gotten this far in the review, anyhow.

Is it a measure of my "unorthodoxy" that, all told, I am still wondering when the author's next book will come out??