BOOK REVIEW by Carl Portman
PREPARE TO WIN
A
club player’s guide to winning at chess before move one
by Jonathan Arnott
Jonathan Arnott
Foreword by GM Gawain Jones
Pages: 226
Published by: Steel City Press
2022 softcover
What is this book about?
The
publisher’s notes:
Preparation used to be something chess
players would only read about; the kind of thing that players would do to prepare
for a World Title match. But like it or not, in the computer age every serious
club player now has two choices: learn to prepare for your opponents or become
a target for their preparation. There isn’t much literature on the subject, and
much less aimed at anyone of 1400 to 2200 strength.
Most of experienced teacher and coach
Jonathan Arnott’s wins against IMs and GMs have come as a result of precisely
this preparation. In some cases, a game has literally been won and lost before
a single move was made on the board. In this book, he provides a grounding in
everything the modern player needs to fight against opponents from club level
to GM. Key topics include:
Ø What to look for in preparation
Ø What to spend your time on
Ø How to avoid becoming a preparation target
Ø Avoiding your opponent’s preparation
Ø Setting traps and dictating the style of game
‘Armed with the
recommendations in this book it will become even tougher for us titled players
to out-prepare our opponents. On behalf of all professionals can I selfishly
ask that you disregard Jonathan’s advice?’ –
GM Gawain Jones
Contents
·
Foreword
·
Introduction
·
Sixteen
Chapters
·
References
and final advice
My thoughts and comments
A
good chess coach will tell their student to ‘begin at the end’ and study the
endgame as much as if not more than the openings initially. In that sense I am
going to start at the end by saying from the off that I highly recommend the
book and that I thoroughly enjoyed it. Don’t just take my word; when an
esteemed grandmaster like Gawain Jones writes a foreword and champions the book
for club players, you know it will be good.
What’s
the book about?
Essentially this is a book sharing the author’s
views on how to prepare for opponents before you even sit opposite them (or
play them online) and he uses his substantial (methodical) experience in this
area to guide the reader through with examples. If you are a French Defence
player (as I am!) then you’ll derive particular pleasure from this book but
trust me, it’s great for everyone.
How
was it for me?
Very useful. I learned plenty of new
things, not least that there was a web site called openingtree.com and you can
use this in your preparation. The author highlights the fact that these days it
can be tricky to prepare against people because they use these weird usernames
online which bear no relation to their actual name, so you have to try to dig
deep and find out who they are, but there are ways to do this. I actually
learned a couple of new lines in the French Defence too, which helped!
I enjoyed some of the top tips, including
this gem ‘When preparing, don’t go into a line you don’t know or understand
just because it’s got a positive engine evaluation.’ So many people nowadays
leave a portion of their brain dormant and let the engine make the decisions,
but this is not going to help a chess player improve. Arnott tells us not to
play lines if we don’t actually know how to play them. This sounds obvious but
we do it so often. There are many more valuable tips but of course I won’t
reveal them all here.
Chess
games
There are plenty of games contained within
the pages of the book. Some involve a player I actually know, and I played him online
only a couple of weeks before this review. If only I had known about the
openingtree resource before I played Harry Taylor!
One lovely example was how Arnott prepared
against the London System. It went 1.d4 e6 2.Bf4 c5!? 3.Nf3 cxd4 4.Nxd4 and we
end up in this position (below)
The author’s prep served him well (2…c5 was
the slippery customer) and he now had a winning move, but what was it? You’ll
see in the book of course.
There are plenty of annotated games and where
parts of games have been given to illustrate points, the full game can be found
at the back of the book, which is useful as I definitely wanted to delve deeper
going into the endgames of some positions.
Was there anything I didn’t like?
Well, a genuine review must involve all of
my feelings in order to be objective although inevitably such feelings are
subjective! Actually, I only have a couple of minor points. I found several typos
and a couple of muddles in the move annotations, and I would have liked an
index of openings, but that is just my preference and in fairness, openings were not the point of the book. Other than that, no problem. I can see how much work and thought has gone into the content and presentation of the book.
Does the book achieve its aim?
Definitely. The author has given me much
food for thought about how I go about preparing for games. Reading about how
another chess player prepares is fascinating and it brought home to me the fact
that so many of us only scratch the surface. There is so much more information
out there on the information superhighway about our opponents and indeed ourselves,
if we are prepared to look for it. The author describes how to interrogate data
and he offers some psychological advice on how to prepare if you don’t even
know who your opponent is to the last minute.
He also reminds us to be honest with
ourselves. We should analyse our own games, our own weaknesses and try to find
ways to fill the gaps. This of course is a vital element of self-improvement
and a very good point indeed. All too often we are not honest with ourselves.
And I should mention his emphasis on ‘not
punishing mistakes immediately.’ This sounds weird, because we often say when
you see an opportunity (a mistake by the opposition) seize upon it immediately
- but Arnott calmy explains his rational and all becomes clear in the book.
There is one other abiding thought from me.
GM David Howell once spoke online about the advantages of writing your games in
a book. That way, your games/preparation/analysis cannot be found online by
billions of people, thus it will make preparing against you much more
difficult. I agree with this totally but we now live in a world where so much
can be found online and Arnott’s book is a very useful tool to aid the keen and
improving chess player to better prepare for games. Can it really be a guide to winning before move one, as the cover suggests? Yes!
We should use any means we can to collect information about our opponents if we are serious about improving. I shall
finish with a start – the first words of the introduction to the book which states
‘Failing to prepare is preparing to fail.’
Amen to that.
Who is the author?
Jonathan Arnott has decades of teaching and
chess coaching experience. He has captained the Yorkshire County side,
represented White Rose in the European Club Cup (the ‘Champions League’ of
chess) and captained Chessable White Rose to victory in the inaugural online
Four Nations Chess League. He is a Candidate Master.
I wish I’d had this book a couple of years ago.
Jonathan’s recommendations took me a lot of trial and error to discover. – GM
Gawain Jones, two-time British Champion.
