CHESS EXPLAINED: THE MODERN BENONI
Author: Zenon Franco
Gambit (2007)
128 pages
$23.95

Reviewed by Anthony Rotella

For an opening that isn't played all that much at the top levels anymore (at least in its purest form, sometimes you see the KID transpose or someone play it from a Nimzo-Indian move order), you sure do see a lot of material come out on the Modern Benoni these days. This might be due to the fact that it's a risky, exciting defense played by many favorite champions of yester-year: Tal, Fischer, and dare I refer to him as champion of yester-year, Garry Kasparov. This exciting, volatile image probably inspires club players immensely, conjuring up fantasies of them playing just as brilliantly against their local nemesis. Anyway, my point is that there are bound to be books that come out that shouldn't be picked up. CHESS EXPLAINED: THE MODERN BENONI is probably one of them.

First some good things: At the end of each chapter there is a summary that is at least somewhat useful in taking all the information presented and chopping it down so that you can make sense of it after looking through the games. There is also a brief section at the beginning of each chapter that tells you what each individual game covers. An interesting feature not covered in most Modern Benoni books, but that is covered in CHESS EXPLAINED: THE MODERN BENONI, are the various transpositional ideas. For instance, delaying ...e6 or using a KID move order. Granted, this section is only two pages, but it gives food for thought. The games are also very well selected: You will recognize most players on both sides of the board and the games are fairly recent, and well known.

Now on to the bad: My first bone to pick is that this book is technically 112 pages, but if you chop out all the indexes and the table of contents, etc., it's really only something like 102. And it costs nearly $25. Now Gambit Publications puts out great books most of the time, and I wouldn't quip about paying even more for a book as great as Dearing's PLAY THE SICILIAN DRAGON, or Watson's MASTERING THE CHESS OPENINGS (both!), but not a book of this length or quality.

I have played the Modern Benoni on and off for as long as I've been playing chess (6 or 7 years now), and I absolutely love it, for many of the reasons already mentioned above. One problem with it though, is that for every variation white can choose, black normally has 3 or 4 different plans, and it seems like no author really has any idea which one is best. That's completely fine, who'd expect them to? But what the good ones do is at least lay them all out for you, so you can decide or at least investigate them for yourself. In CHESS EXPLAINED: THE MODERN BENONI, Zenon Franco skips some crucial lines that, in my opinion, should definitely be included. For instance, there is no coverage of the very interesting, and arguably critical 1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 c5 3.d5 e6 4.Nc3 exd5 5.cxd5 d6 6.e4 g6 7.h3 Bg7 8.Nf3 0-0 9.Bd3 b5!?, a crazy pawn sacrifice that either leads to an endgame where White is up a pawn, but Black is most certainly able to win it back (if he's okay after that is up for debate), or leads to super complicated positions where Black may invest even more (see the famous game Van Wely-Topalov, Wijk an Zee, 1998). Certainly a book that purports to show important Benoni themes through games could include one of the most hotly debated lines in the Benoni to date (and one that uses the very common ...b5 theme)?

Another plan that's missing is the impetuous 9...Re8 or 9...a6 and 10...Re8 lines in the Fianchetto variation (after 1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 c5 3.d5 e6 4.Nc3 exd5 5.cxd5 d6 6.Nf3 g6 7.g3 Bg7 8.Bg2 0-0 9.0-0). It gets a very brief mention, but no analysis, and if you weren't looking for it, you may even miss the brief and uninspiring note. Another line that's given the short shift is the Four Pawns Attack: 1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 c5 3.d5 e6 4.Nc3 exd5 5.cxd5 d6 6.e4 g6 7.f4 Bg7 8.Be2 0-0 9.0-0 Re8 10.e5!?. This is, of course, a really important line. Franco only covers 10.Nfd2 (the chicken option). There are other lines I would have liked to have seen at least briefly covered, for instance ...Nbd7 in response to Bb5+ in the Flick-Knife Attack, or a chapter on very early deviations, such as early Nxd5 options (instead of cxd5) or dxe6 options.
 
Now it's mentioned that these lines are omitted from the book because they contain too much hard analysis. You couldn't spare the extra pages to give the readers some idea of what's happening in these critical variations? You didn't want to top 115 pages? So this brings up the ultimate question: What audience can this book actually target? It's much too brief and isn't structured to be a repertoire book, so that option is out (Anyway, nothing could compete with Watson's masterpiece, GUIDE TO THE MODERN BENONI. Not even God Himself). It doesn't cover all the important lines, so it certainly can't be a book that's meant to update readers on all of the recent theory. It does outline important themes in the Modern Benoni, but I'm not sure that it does it better than Endre Vegh's STARTING OUT: THE MODERN BENONI, which has an absolutely massive section at the beginning, outlining all the typical Benoni plans, and then has a great section of games, outlining theory and more ideas inherent to the specific lines in question.

In conclusion, even though I seemed to be a big downer on this book, I'd give the material that's included in the book a solid 7/10, but I couldn't really recommend the book to anyone else, simply because there has been much better material written on this opening, and this book really contributes nothing new, except showing the reader some games that weren't played until after the next most recent Modern Benoni book came out.

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