It seems that many cockamamy openings have more coverage in opening theory literature than the sound and useful Bishop's Opening. Too bad this book fails to fill this surprising gap. Gary Lane's effort in "The Bishop's Opening Explained" is superficial. Very few games are covered and the annotations are often weak, with a tendency to mention facile tactical sidelines rather than meaningfully addressing more critical variations.



An example of the general level of neglect is Pirrot-Thinius (1997), one of only four or five Urusov games covered. The author notes that Black lost on time in a difficult position just as White's edge was growing to a winning advantage. Lane leaves it at that and fails to even mention the fact that, absent time controls, White objectively threw away the win on his last recorded move. (Lane's silence is at the very least tacit endorsement of the move.) Similar slips leave one with a deflated sense of confidence in the analysis.



Lane is an accomplished player who has personally assayed this opening on occasion. Moreover, due to the breadth of possible transpositions after 2. Bc4, I appreciate that covering all the territory is no simple task. However, I would have preferred a purposeful and well selected and argued repertoire-based approach to justify sidestepping some of the black holes of theory while providing detailed coverage of selected lines. Instead, we have a shallow and unfocused effort that doesn't provide enough information to decide what to play or how to play it. It reminds me of those notoriously easy courses in college -- "Introduction to XYZ" -- where the entire class seems only designed to provide an amplified if airy definition of what XYZ is rather than to teach the real content of the subject. Whether due to publisher space limitations or otherwise, this seems a rather generalized effort designed to capitalize on, rather than to meaningfully fill, the paucity of guidance on the Bishop's Opening.



Finally, I should mention that I have found free on-line resources on this opening to be at least as useful as this book. So why pay twenty bucks?