Mastering the French
Mastering the French
By Neil McDonald, Andrew Harley
Publisher: B.T. Batsford ( 2001-09 ) | 192 pages | ISBN : 0713457163 | PDF | 7 MB
By Neil McDonald, Andrew Harley
Publisher: B.T. Batsford ( 2001-09 ) | 192 pages | ISBN : 0713457163 | PDF | 7 MB
This review is very long, but it comes from someone with 1,500+ games' experience with the French Defense (live and on the internet). If not for this book, my chess career may have been over before it ever really got started.
Let me begin by telling you a bit about my chess career before I started playing the French to provide a context. I don't think this is a digression; possibly, you will find parallels in it to your own chess development, see why playing the French may (or may not) be a good choice for you, and how this book can literally change your chess tournament life–the way it did for me.
I learned how to play chess at 8, but did not study chess until I was 11 or play in a tournament until I was 12 1/2 in March 1996. So, I felt I had to play "catch up" with other kids in tournaments who had been playing for years. Now these kids mostly played 1…e5 or 1…c5 in response to 1.e4. These two replies were how I began defending against 1.e4, because I thought that this is the way I was "supposed to" play.