Battling the French & Caro-Kann: A Practical Opening Repertoire for White – Volume 1 – HARDCOVER

I am pleased to present, dear reader, my new work. This book is my first work on an opening repertoire for White. I used to write books advocating Black: I considered such openings as the Grünfeld Defense, the Modern Benoni Defense, the Volga Gambit. This book is the first part of my opening repertoire for White. In the future, I plan to release parts 2 and 3, where the rest of the openings will be covered. In this work, my main focus is the French Defense and the Caro-Kann Defense. They are fairly similar openings, since the main concept is to hit the center with ...d7-d5. The writing of this book was spontaneous. I didn't initially have a direct goal of writing a book, and at first, I just analyzed for myself using ideas on the Internet, but the analysis grew... and it grew more and more. The structuring of the options somehow happened in my head and I decided to write a book.

I would like to explain why I chose certain options. Let's start with the French Defense: For the French Defense, I chose the exchange variation. My choice was made on purpose: the fact is that in 2018 a wonderful book “Keep it Simple” was published by Christof Sielecki, who recommended playing the exchange variation against the French defense. It surprised me very much and I played exactly according to this book for a long time. But as time went on, chess engines improved, and gradually I analyzed something, found new ideas and slowly began to move away from the author’s ideas in favor of my own. Of course, a great contribution to the work was made by the strongest, most up-to-date engines in the world: Stockfish, as well as
Leela Chess Zero.

The exchange variation suited my style: the risk-free game tempted me and it was really important that the chances of losing became minimal – in such a situation it became convenient and psychologically comfortable to play. It can be said that I have been writing the part on the French Defense since 2018, and I am happy to present the reader with the final version of my great work. I am sure that in the future (with the release of new versions of the engines) there will be enhancements to my work, but for the moment the result I achieved is quite satisfactory for me. I would like to point out that the exchange variation of the French Defense is often dismissively treated by strong chess players – that if White plays like this, then he strives for a draw – but this is far from being the case and modern games prove it. Even former world champion Magnus Carlsen has employed this variation. Of course, most strong chess players might be frightened by the fact that the position is symmetrical and will not be so easy to win but – for example, in various variations of the Spanish game of the Berlin Defense – there are also symmetrical positions. Also in Petrov's Defense, and quite a few chess players play these positions for White, so then why can't we play such symmetrical structures in the French Defense? Of course, our third move 3.exd5, objectively speaking, does not pretend to\ rebut the French Defense or to be the mathematically-strongest continuation, but this move has great practical force. The point is that we want to play without risk: this is a two-way game, either White will win or there will be a draw. For us, this will be an ideal alignment, but on the pages of the book the reader will be convincedthat there are also many dynamic resources, various tactical factors and combinations in the emerging situations.