Actually, Advance, Exchange and Offbeat french book
This book is a must have for the serious french player just for one reason: it is the only book available at the moment that have, decently covered the exchange variation of the french (which, when you think about it is pretty amazing but is true). Actually, this is decent book covering mainly the advance variation (95 pages), and few offbeat ones, like 2.d3 and 2.De2, offering 27 pages for it. For exchange it offers 30 pages, which is not bad at all. Well, maybe a bit better book for advance is Tony Kostens French Advance, but its a pretty dated now (1997), so this Psakhis book is still the winner.
2005-10-28
Detailed but so demanding!
I found the text to be frustrating at times as I kept losing my place in the maze of variations. More is definitely not better. It was almost as if we had had access to his notebook computer files where variation upon variation had been patched in over the years.
The author is a highly respected French defence exponent. Perhaps it showed my own shortcomings and is more suited to 2000+ rated players.
2005-04-11
