Planning

Paraguayan Grandmaster Zenon Franco is another Everyman regular with an excellent body of work. His latest effort, Planning Move by Move, utilizes the Everyman instructional format perfectly with the 74 games not only well-annotated but with questions and answers sprinkled throughout.

Three World Champions games figure prominently in this book devoted to finding the right plan: Magnus Carlsen, Vassily Smyslov and Anatoly Karpov. One of the latter’s efforts that gets the spotlight is game nine of Korchnoi-Karpov of the 1981 World Championship match where Black gives a lesson on how to defend against the isolated queen pawn. That game featured the pawn structure d4 (isolated) versus …c6 (isolated) and …e6 – A.K. willingly capturing on c6 with a pawn instead of a piece to prevent the liquidating d5. Those who thought this was a novel strategy will find another game in this book, also from a World Championship match (Lasker-Capablanca, Havana 1921) where Black adopted this strategy.

Players from 1800-2400 will benefit from Planning Move by Move which is a first-rate instructional effort.