Book Description

World Champions exert a strong influence on fashion in opening play, and Garry Kasparov is no exception. His advocacy of such variations as the Tarrasch, Catalan and Gruenfeld has brought these openings from the back pages of opening manuals into the forefront of theoretical discussion. The purpose of this book is to explore the development of Kasparov's opening repertoire and to present the core of a repertoire which the reader can apply in his own games. All recent theoretical developments have been incorporated into the work, so that the most important variations of these openings are critically up to date as at June 2012. It is not our intention lo present deep analysis of the middle game and endgame portions of Kasparov's games. The World Champion has done that himself in a number of places. We will, on occasion, add our own corrections and improvements to the published canon, but the games are included primarily to illustrate the themes of the openings. It is interesting to note the number of top players who have adopted portions of this repertoire. Jan Timman, Tony Miles and Valery Salov are just three of the players whose games will be examined in our book. We have attempted to analyze critically all important positions, and have introduced a number of new ideas in familiar positions. The authors have worked together over many months to collect and analyze the relevant material. Some of the analysis by Grandmaster Shamkovich first appeared in the American publication Chess Life. Older material on the Tarrasch was used in our book Play the Tarrasch (Ishi Press 2012), Both The first and second editions of Eric Schiller's Catalan {Chess Enterprises. l98l and 1988) and Gruenfeld Defense: Russian Variations (Ishi Press 2012) were used for the preparation of this work, as well as research notes and analysis for his forthcoming works on the Closed Spanish and Hedgehog openings.