The King's Indian Defence: Mar del Plata Variation

by Svetozar Gligorić

Yugoslav Grandmaster Svetozar Gligoric is firmly established as one of the great pioneers of the King's Indian strategy and tactics. The variation he introduced in a tournament at Mar del Plata, Argentina, fifty years ago, is characterised by fierce attacks by the opposing sides - White on the queenside and Black on the castled king - making for exciting games and many dashing Black wins. This book contains not only up-to-date theory and illustrative...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0713487674
• ISBN13: 9780713487671
• Release Date: June 2003
• Publisher: B.T. Batsford
• Length: 160 Pages
• Weight: 0.44 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.5" x 8.7"

Customer Reviews

"Much To Chew On"

I don't know how long I have had this book now, but I would say it has been AT LEAST a month ... I purchased very shortly after it became available. (The release date was like June of this year, but they may have come out with it a little early.)First you should know I am a LIFE-Master at chess, for many years now I have made my living by teaching chess on the Internet, building chess web pages, and writing about the game. (You will find a deeply annotated game in this line on my web site.)The next thing I should tell you is that if you are a beginner or have played chess less than 1-2 years, DON'T buy this book!But let's say you are not a beginner, and you feel experienced enough to tackle a book of this kind. There are still a lot of things you should know. First off, the King's Indian Defense is an EXTEMELY complicated and difficult opening. I played my first chess tournaments in the 1960's but did not begin playing frequently until the very early `70's. I purchased the giant book on the K.I.D. (the hard-back one by Barden, Hartston, & Keene); and I began to study. I memorized literally hundreds of the lines in the book. But when I played this difficult opening in tournaments, I usually lost, and often lost badly. (Eventually I abandoned the opening entirely - or at least gave it up for over 20 years.) And I have heard of similar experiences by other players who went on to become experts or even masters at chess. AFTER I broke Master, I bought a few books on this opening and began studying again. And although I did better than before, my experiences with this opening were less than perfect. (I relate this just so you will understand what a difficult opening the "King's Indian Defense" really is.)This is not to say that the King's Indian is unplayable ... far from it!! Geller, Boleslavsky, Bronstein - and many other Soviet players of that generation mapped this dynamic opening out. ("Before E. Geller, we did not understand the King's Indian." - Mikhail Botvinnik.) And of course Bobby Fischer used the K.I.D. so much ... it was really his "meat and potatoes." And Garry Kasparov has also used the King's Indian quite a bit ... and won many beautiful and brilliant games with it. (Many modern GM's use this opening today.) The next thing you will want to know is that this is a high-quality book, by a publisher (Batsford), which has a lot of experience publishing chess books. Nice and sturdy flex-cover, a good job of translation, good editing, a good font, excellent diagrams, pages with little bleed-through, a very solid job of organizing, etc.The author, Svetozar Gligoric - who is getting older and is probably past 70 now - was once one of the best players in the World. (FIDE rated him as being in the top ten in the world in the late 50's and early 60's. `ChessMetrics' says he was in the `TOP 50' in the world from the late 1940's ... all the way until 1980!!! His peak seems to have been in '58 or '59 when he was ranked as # 6 in the world with a ra