Maintaining and preparing an opening repertoire is a very demanding task and requires A LOT of thought in terms of move orders and transpositional considerations. In this book Neil does a lot of the work for you. He reccomends lines that have stood the test of time and will NOT be refuted.



The layout of the book is pleasant with a discussion on ideas and then a miniture game illustrating those ideas. And follows up with annotated model games where it goes over pitfalls for both sides and deviations from theory. A well balanced discussion to say the least.



Looking closer; although I do not agree with some of the lines that he suggests due to the fact that I am a lover of the Ruy Lopez "The King of Openings", and would prefer playing that opening rather than the Scotch, but that's just me. Also I feel that it does give an adequate amount of open sicilian material to stay afloat but would require an entire book (such as beating the sicilian 3) for adequate preparation against strong opponents (elo 2000 and up-and the ones who religiously go over reams and reams of memorized theory every waking hour). But the idea is to pick and choose what positions that you like to have and learn the theory behind it.



Here is an overview of the reccomended lines



.. e5 : Scotch

Sicilian: Open Sicilian

Scandanavian: Bd2 variation

Caro-Kann: Panov-Botvinnik Attack

French: Tarrasch-Korchnoi Gambit

Pirc: 150 attack

* and uses easy to learn strategic set-ups with less frequent lines, thus saving the reader time.