Quality Chess Blog

Hello Jacob,
I think Kotronias has not covered the pure h3 System with Sf3 and without Le2.
This system is very important. So will there be another book ?

@HorstBrack

Are you referring to a move order that is different from the one covered in Chapters 16-18 of Volume 4?

@HorstBrack
No more books for sure. I have no idea of what is in them, I cannot read all 5,000 pages each year, even though I do see them all :-). We are a team.

@HorstBrack
Are you referring to the Makogonov, or some other h3 system? The Makogonov is covered in book 4 (including without Be2).

Slightly off-topic: I was wondering what’s the correct spelling: Makogonov or Makagonov? I see both spellings being used on websites, in chess books, etc. But I guess there can be only one correct spelling – which is it?

russian name: Макогонов, Владимир Андреевич
in Russian it’s written Makogonov, pronounced ‘Makaganov’, just as Prokofiev pronounced ‘Prakofiev’, Popov pronounced ‘Papov’ etc. so the right spelling (writing) should be Makogonov.

@Cowe
Thanks, that’s what I figured as well, with my one-year Russian course 🙂 . So, in many chess books the spelling is wrong…

I don’t know if this has been asked before, but I cannot seem to find the 3.h4 (or 3.Nc3 Bg7 4.h4) variation. If it is really not in this series, can there maybe be an update? Just like the updates at the end of this book.

@TD
Gawain Jones covers 3.h4 (13 full pages) as well as the various delayed versions of h4 in his more recent Grandmaster Repertoire books on the King’s Indian.

@Benjamin Fitch
Yes I know Benjamin, thank you. But for the sake of completeness I am curious about Kotronias’ take on the matter.

@TD
I think you are being unrealistic. The Kotronias books were published 6 years ago. As Nigel Short remarked recently opening books have the shelf life of a sandwich….if that’s a little bit exaggerated, an author revisiting a work from 6 years ago is unrealistic.

@Paul H
You are probably right, but my question was triggered by the fact that I saw the updates (with improvements of previous “mistakes” or new insights) of book 1 to 4 in book 5, so why hasn’t there been an update (in a pdf) of book 5 (which could than also have included a chapter on 3.h4 e.g.) ? Yesterday I found 6.h4 in Chapter 12 on 5.Be2 by the way, so my wish is partly fulfilled. 🙂

@Paul H
Your remarks have inspired me to clean out my fridge.

@TD:

By the time Kotronias’ last KID book was published, there were an entirety of 7 games played with 3.h4 in games featuring players rated 2400 or higher. Out of those 7 games, White scored a lousy 2 points, one of which came at the hands of a 2645 rated GM defeating a 2413 rated IM. It is not surprising at all that this line didn’t make the cut.

If authors updated their books all the time, they wouldn’t be doing anything else in their lives anymore. I think it would be wise to treat any opening book or series as a treatment on the CURRENT state of theory, not as an encyclopedia of what is objectively the best way to play that opening that can’t be improved upon or must include every possibility by the opponent.

While I would absolutely say that newer material about the KID or Grünfeld that attempt to cover the entire complex including sidelines should include 3.h4, it makes no sense to me to expect the same from material that came out years before this line emerged.

Kotronias did generously provide some updates in his final volume because he wanted to correct some details from earlier in the series. We have no plans to publish additional updates, and if you have the Jones KID books anyway then you have everything you need to meet these early h4 lines.

That is pretty well reasoned, I do think there may be some value in older opening works, but that is very dependent on the topic and author.

The Jones’ books is the update 🙂