Chess theory
[4] The modern trend, however, is to assign paramount importance to analysis of the specific position at hand rather than to general principles.
[17] Murray observes that it "is no haphazard collection of commencements of games, but is an attempt to deal with the Openings in a systematic way.
[23] Damiano's book was followed by general treatises on chess play by Ruy López de Segura (1561), Giulio Cesare Polerio (1590), Gioachino Greco (c. 1625), Joseph Bertin (1735), and François-André Danican Philidor (1749).
[24][25] The first author to attempt a comprehensive survey of the openings then known was Aaron Alexandre in his 1837 work Encyclopédie des Échecs.
[26] According to Hooper and Whyld, "[Carl] Jaenisch produced the first openings analysis on modern lines in his Analyse nouvelle des ouvertures (1842-43).
"[27] In 1843, Paul Rudolf von Bilguer published the German Handbuch des Schachspiels, which combined the virtues of Alexandre and Jaenisch's works.
It is now the longest-published opening treatise in history; the fifteenth edition (commonly called MCO-15), by Grandmaster Nick de Firmian, was published in April 2008.
"[35] In 1937–39 former World Champion Max Euwe published a twelve-volume opening treatise, De theorie der schaakopeningen, in Dutch.
[43] In the late 1930s to early 1950s Reuben Fine, one of the world's strongest players,[44] also became one of its leading theoreticians, publishing important works on the opening, middlegame, and endgame.
Its great innovation is that it expresses games in languageless figurine algebraic notation and annotated them using no words, but rather seventeen symbols, whose meanings were explained at the beginning of the book in six different languages.
This enabled readers around the world to read the same games and annotations, thus greatly accelerating the dissemination of chess ideas and the development of opening theory.
[49] It now uses 57 symbols, explained in 10 languages, to annotate games (see Punctuation (chess)), and is available in both print and electronic formats.
[60] "Books and monographs on openings are popular, and as they are thought to become out of date quickly there is a steady supply of new titles.
[63] Watson writes, "Players wishing to study this area of the game have a limited and rather unsatisfactory range of resources from which to choose.
Leading player and theorist Aron Nimzowitsch's[65] influential books, My System (1925),[66] Die Blockade (1925) (in German),[67] and Chess Praxis (1936),[68][69] are among the most important works on the middlegame.
[64] Nimzowitsch called attention to the possibility of letting one's opponent occupy the centre with pawns while you exert control with your pieces as in the Nimzo-Indian or Queen's Indian defences.
He also drew attention to the strategy of occupying open files with one's rooks in order to later penetrate to the seventh rank where they could attack the enemy pawns and hem in the opponent's king.
[78] Another key turning point in middlegame theory came with the release of Alexander Kotov's book Think like a Grandmaster in 1971.
He also noted how some players seem to fall victim to what is now known as Kotov's Syndrome: they calculate out a large range of different lines, become dissatisfied with the result, and realizing that they are short on time, play a completely new candidate move without even checking whether it is sound.
More recently, Jonathan Tisdall, John Nunn and Andrew Soltis have elaborated on Kotov's tree theory further.
[85] The second edition (1777) of Philidor's Analyse du jeu des Échecs devoted 75 pages of analysis to various endgames.
[90] Grandmaster Andrew Soltis in a 2004 book expressly disagreed with Staunton, claiming that the rook versus two bishops and knight ending is drawn with correct play.
