Book Review: Back to Basics: Chess Openings by Carsten Hansen

Back to Basics: Chess Openings

By Carsten Hansen

CarstenChess 2021, 249 pages

Subtitled 'A comprehensive guide to chess openings and opening play', this book provides a concise, outline survey of all the chess openings. Variations are kept to a bare minimum, generally stopping after 10-15 moves. Clear, helpful prose explanations inform the reader of what kind of play can be expected in each opening - whether sharp, positional, strategically complex, theory-laden, and so on.

The purpose is to allow players who are new to the study of openings to make informed choices: which lines would the reader like to investigate more deeply and adopt as part of a repertoire?

At the same time, this full overview should enable readers to feel that there is no completely unknown territory in the chess openings.

FIDE Master Hansen engagingly recounts a few of his own false starts as a junior, which stemmed from the lack of such a general survey. The personal touch is particularly welcome in a starting-out book like this.

Hansen provides a useful glossary of terms and symbols that are taken for granted in most books, such as 'unclear' or '!?' While refraining from specific recommendations, he also suggests principles by which the reader can choose which resources to invest in when it comes to building up a repertoire.

Handy tips in boxes interspersed throughout the volume tell us key things to remember: for example, 'Don't spend more time on the opening than you do on the middlegame and endgame.' That is an important one and particularly hard for most of us to stick to.

There is a great deal of clear, articulate, practical common sense in this book. It is the one I would recommend to almost anyone who wishes to purchase a first openings book.

The first edition of this book was published in 2010, and Hansen has now updated it. New sections include a general guide to selecting online resources. It is possible to quibble about how evenly the updates have been carried out. For example, the short section on 1 b4, the Orangutan or Sokolsky Opening, gives as the main line 1...e5 2 Bb2 Bxb4 3 Bxe5 Nf6 4 c4 0-0 5 e3 and so on. Hansen's own new book on 1 b4, however, recommends something completely different on move 4.

But that is not a serious problem with a book in which maps and explanations are far more important than cutting-edge lines. Hansen impressively succeeds in making opening theory accessible and in showing how to make further study properly focused and economical.

A final thought: where possible I try to compare the books I review to similar ones on the market. In this case, as far as I know, Back to Basics: Chess Openings fills a gap and doesn't have a very obvious competitor. But it is historically interesting to compare a publication from half a century ago: Eugene Znosko-Borovsky's How to Play the Chess Openings (1971), which had similar aims. Needless to say, Hansen's work is much more useful to a reader in 2022.