One of the hardest skills in chess is the ability to defend and yet this is one of the least covered topics in chess literature. The list is definitely a short one. The chapter How to Defend by Paul Keres in THE ART OF THE MIDDLEGAME (Penguin 1964), THE ART OF DEFENSE (David McKay 1975) by Andy Soltis, THE ART OF DEFENSE IN CHESS (Pergammon 1988) by Yakov Damsky and Lev Polugaevsky and Mihai Marin’s SECRETS OF CHESS DEFENSE (Gambit 2003) are the only books that come readily to the this reviewer’s mind. Add one more to the list with GRANDMASTER SECRETS: COUNTERATTACK by GM Zenon Franco.
Franco, who has developed a following with his excellent middlegame treatises CHESS SELF-IMPROVEMENT and THE ART OF ATTACKING CHESS – both published by Gambit – has organized his book around seven chapters and 30 heavily annotated illustrative games. The chapters include: Lasker, the Master of Defense and Counterattack ; Refuting Premature Attacks; Fighting Blow by Blow; Regrouping; Prophylactic Thinking; Simplification.
The 30 games which cover a century of top flight chess from Tarrasch-Lasker, Dusseldorf 1908 to Leko-Mamedyarov, Wijk aan Zee 2008, include classics like Benko-Petrosian from the Candidates tournament of 1962 where the future World Champion develops his Queen Knight prematurely but due to the closed nature of the position is able to get away with undeveloping with ...Nf6-g8 and ...Be7-f8. This tremendous game is a perfect example of the unique skills Petrosian possessed.
Franco passes out information as he finds it. This isn’t an opening book, but how many of those reading this review know that the lines 1.c4 c5 2.Nc3 g6 3.Nf3 Bg7 4.d4 cxd4 5.Nxd4 Nc6 6.Nc2 Bxc3+ 7.bxc3 Qa5 and 1.c4 c5 2.Nc3 Nf6 3.g3 d5 4.cxd5 Nxd5 5.Bg2 Nc7 6.Qb3!? Nc6 7.Bxc6+ bxc6 8.Qa4, as used by Larsen, Kortchnoi and M. Gurevich, among others, is exactly the same position with the same player to move?
The highlight of this book is the final chapter, Three Memorable Struggles, where Franco takes apart Szabo-Botvinnik, Budapest 1952, Browne-Fischer, Rovinj/Zagreb 1970 and Kasparov-Topalov, Linares 2004. The analysis of the Browne-Fischer game will be of special interest to fans of Bobby. It was played before Browne became a world class Grandmaster and was the only time these two icons of American chess ever met. Fischer quickly got the better of it out of the opening but Browne resisted and when Bobby missed a chance to put Walter away the latter started to outplay him. It took ferocious resistance to save the game for Black.
What really makes this book different from early books on defending are the more than 60 exercises that Franco offers the student to solve, all of which relate directly to the material covered and feature detailed solutions with both the correct answer and plenty of explanatory prose.
GRANDMASTER SECRETS: COUNTERATTACK! can be warmly recommended to all players rated 2000 and higher.
