Roger de Coverly wrote: ↑Fri Dec 20, 2019 6:25 pm
Tim Harding wrote: ↑Fri Dec 20, 2019 5:46 pm
There was probably a bit of checking each other's work but essentially the Pirc was by Botterill.
There's a flavour of there being two different authors. There's a line which runs 1. e4 d6 2. d4 Nf6 3. Nc3 g6 4. f4 Bg7 5. Bc4 which is included in the Austrian Attack chapters. Also 1.e4 d6 2. d4 Nf6 3. Nc3 g6 4. Bc4 Bg7 5. f4 which is in the Bc4 chapter. Needless to say the suggested continuation is different across the chapters.
The continuation 5. .. d5 had been played by Raymond himself in his 1971 game at Palma against Ljubojevic. That had been from the Austrian move order which is where in the book the idea is suggested. There's not anything wrong with it, but over the years, the "obvious" continuation of 5. .. 0-0 has been preferred. The "fork trick" 5. .. Nxe4 is also OK as are 5. .. c5 and 5. .. c6.
This is one of the reasons I think both books are well worth getting hold of, even now. They cover stuff like this and newer books don’t.
I had exactly the line that Roger mentions in tournament game a few years back. The Keene/botterill books were a great help in exploring the positions that result.
I didn’t know about how the labour was divided. Sounds entirely plausible (although Ray implies something a little different in
Becoming a Grandmaster.
I agree about Flank Openings with one reservation ... I have the fourth edition and - like a Hollywood movie franchise, perhaps - progressively less effort seems to have been put in for each new edition.
Iirc somewhere in the 4th edition there’s a comment still in there about what would need updating if there was ever a third edition - which seems a bit lazy.
But again - half a century old or otherwise - a club chesser wanting to play these systems could do a lot worse than picking up a copy of this to start with
