PREPARE TO WIN A club player's guide to winning at chess before move one

 

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.