In the latter part of 1996 Pal Benko and I were sitting in a hotel room on the island of Menorca (off the coast of Spain), staring at Eric Schiller bashing away at his chess database (which kept crashing). He had just told us how he once wrote a chess book in two days. Appalled, I was playing with the idea of tossing him out the window or, at the very least, having Benko rough him up a bit.

It was during this moral dilemma that Schiller handed me a manuscript with the ribald title The Big Book of Busts. My first reaction was, of course, negative. However, when I noticed that his co-author was John Watson (who in my mind is one of the best theoretical writers I have ever seen), I grudgingly took a closer look.

Now I am forced to swallow my bigoted view of Schiller's work (or does this just validate my opinion of Watson?) and admit that this is a GREAT BOOK (by the way, this particular book took many months to write)! Taking a look at backwater lines like the Grob, Polish, Englund Gambit, Woozle, and Hawk, and also exploring more respectable openings like the English Defense, the Budapest Gambit and just about everything else under the sun (over 80 openings!!), the authors try hard to show the reader what systems are nothing but bluff and what lines have actual point.

Lots of prose helps explain their views, strange fonts bring a smile to our faces (a yin-yang sign tells us that a line is worth playing, a skull and crossbones tells us that the line is poison, a frowning face or a smiling face is self-explanatory, while you have to get the book to find out what the Mickey-Mouse ears mean), an index of variations (and an index of named openings) allows us to find what interests us in a quick and easy manner, and a bibliography tells us what sources were consulted.

The most important thing in the book, however, is the analysis, and The Big Book of Busts delivers on a grand scale (the sections on the Fried Liver Attack, the Philidor Countergambit, and the Keres Defense are worth the price of the book alone!). New evaluations, new ideas, lots of very important novelties; all these things make this book a virtual must for any active player.

Of course, some negatives do exist. A few sections are poorly represented (or give busts that, in my opinion, are not busts at all) and, unavoidably, a few typos have clawed their way into the finished product. However, don't let these minor things blind you to the fact that The Big Book of Busts is actually an extremely important addition to any serious chess library.

I find it interesting that this book has not sold very many copies (I'm told that most players don't even know it exists!). It's fun, it's informative, it virtually destroys the generic analysis found in most other books, and it tells you what's good and what's not under one, easy on the eye, cover.

My recommendation? Buy a copy for yourself and, when you see how good it really is, tell your chess buddies about it too.

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