Utdrag av Bologans forord

Why should you play (or teach) the Marshall or the Breyer?

Although it would be nice to reduce the required effort by playing something other than 3...a6, I’m convinced that when a player starts playing the Ruy Lopez, he should pick up the primary main lines, without trying to avoid the numerous sidelines with which White can try to surprise him. The knowledge accumulated by studying many different types of positions will only help the student to widen his repertoire by adopting interesting alternatives, such as the old-fashioned Chigorin System or the super-elite Berlin Defence, just to mention a few alternatives.

My first choice in the main line is the Marshall Attack, where I plan to offer two options for Black. This choice is not hard to explain. When White tries to avoid the main line against the Ruy Lopez it is due not to fear of the Zaitsev or Moscow lines, but to fear of the notorious Marshall Attack. However, as one of my friends (who was eagerly awaiting this book) put it: ‘Yes, I know that the Marshall is cool, with many super-duper lines played by the elite GMs, but I simply do not want to play it!’ My previous book (which from here on I shall refer to as ‘BBW’) contained a similar dilemma: against 3.♗c4, should I allow the Evans Gambit after 3...♗c5 4.b4, or should I accept the possibility of playing a pawn down with 3...♘f6 4 ♘g5 d5 5 exd5 ♘a5 ? As the reaction of readers of BBW has confirmed, the only good answer is to include both options. In this book it means that the alternative to the Marshall Attack is the Breyer Variation. And so, dear reader, we again have two 250-page books inside one cover!

Aside from the coaches, who will use more or less all Parts and Chapters of the book, I assume that there will be three types of players utilizing this book. The first two types are obvious: the Marshall players, for whom I have covered more open lines (with ...Bc5 whenever possible), and the Breyer players, who are satisfied with the closed setups based on placing the bishop on e7.

However, we also have players who like to play the Anti-Marshalls as Black, meaning that if after 7...0-0, White offers the Marshall with 8 c3, they will say: ‘Thanks, but no thanks’ and transpose toward the Breyer with 8...d6. Of course, there’s no reason that a Breyer player can’t play 5...Bc5 against, for example, 5.Qe2. On the contrary, I encourage the reader to extend his repertoire and thus his understanding of chess in general.

Book Conventions

One of the conventions used already in BBW, and again in this book, is showing the diagrams with the black pieces on the ‘south’ side of the diagram. Some readers don’t like it, such as GM Mathew Sadler, who wrote in his otherwise very positive review of BBW: ‘It has honestly cost me a couple of months to be at peace with this innovation: it looks completely wrong to me!’

Well, I can only say in my defence that in every table war-game with tin soldiers, the participants are taking up positions ‘behind’ their armies, even when those positions are not on the ‘south’ side of the battlefield. The PC war-games (like Shogun or WarCraft) also prefer to show the map of the battlefield turned toward the player – and not strictly following the south to north orientation (as all other maps are doing).

Therefore, most chess books have – as they should – all the diagrams in the south to north orientation (White at the bottom, Black at the top). On the other hand, if we keep in mind that most readers (although probably not all) of a repertoire book for Black are moving the pieces while sitting on ‘their’ side of the board, it would be convenient for them to have the orientation of the diagrams correspond to what they see on the board.