The Russian Chess House is a new publishing firm, apparently a division of Convekta, the Chess Assistant people. Their first books included the appealing WORLD CHESS CHAMPIONSHIP MATCHES # 1-3 and their series MASTERPIECES OF CHESS COMPOSITION. Here Alexander Kalinen has put out two opening books with the same languageless notation, SICILIAN DEFENCE and FRENCH DEFENCE (both subtitled “Modern Practice”). The series title is “The Opening Self-Tutor: Modern Experience.” The expressed hope is to help readers play the opening without “sinking in the boundless flood of chess information.”

The books are organized by games (448 for the Sicilian, 401 for the French), filled rather densely by sub-games and annotations; and there are exercises on strategy and tactics at the back of the book. Although there is no allowance for specific ideas or middlegame instruction, Kalinen has in some cases used a “TM” sign to indicate a “typical method” that is employed in the game. There are very few of these in the Sicilian book but many in the French volume; obviously they are scant substitute for the real investigation of a position, but they may be helpful markers.

As with the World Championship series above, Kalinen quotes a number of other annotators for better-known games, mostly Russian. In many other contests, the notes are imbedded fragments, just as in a typical database output. Kalinen himself frequently adds notes, usually brief, and these are welcome because they add something unique to the presentation. Because they are wordless, these books require some serious study and discipline; the reader may also miss the relatively easy reference to specific move orders provided by a specialized Everyman or Gambit book, for example. The main function of this series is to familiarize a student with typical games and quite a few of the concrete variations of these important openings.

I feel that they are not as readable as the corresponding Everyman and Gambit books, and not systematic enough to work with easily. On the other hand, their scope is broader than most openings books, there are suggestions and notes unfamiliar to the Western reader, and fans of these openings may be drawn to the large number of annotated games.