fantasy freak
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re:The ECO five volumes - 2006/07/24 04:46
I played chess when I was in college and just after graduation in the late 70s. As I progressed from a beginner to Expert (highest rating
2167 USCF) I used ECO in the following way: After I played I game I compare the moves to ECO to find the point that I or my opponent left opening theory then I would try to understand whether the deviation was inferor to the book move and more importantly why it was inferior.
On those rare occasions where I reached the end of an ECO line I would try to understand the reasoning behind the evaluation and also analyze the game from that point to find my mistakes after the opening.
Especially if my result was not aligned with ECO's evaluation.
I stopped playing chess for a number of years and recently have gotten back into it. When I stopped I sold several of the ECO volumes and have not realy felt the need to replace them.
When the ECO volumes were the only game in town (e.g. the only comprehensive treatment of opening practice) they were great. Two things have changed:
1) The ECO volumes used to have sections covered by prominant GMs who either played the lines involved or who had published other opening books on those lines, For example, Korchnoi covered the Open Ruy
Lopez variations. I believe that somewhere around the 3rd or 4th editions the changes to the ECOs were done by just incorporating the annotated games from recent chess informants.
2) Extensive chess database software and game collections became widely available. I think that the modern serious chess player relies on these databases of actual games supplemented by analyzed games from
Informant or other sources.
The intention of ECO was never to explain the ideas behind openings, but rather to give concrete evaluation of variations based on the results of games and analysis by GMs to compensate for the fact that the game result does not always indicate the correct evaluation of a line (because of mistakes that occur after the opening).
The most recent (4th) edition of ECO is already outdated. However, serious correspondence players, who scavange through all the analysis they can find on their opening lines in the hopes of finding suggestions that have been forgotten or which might lead to novelties still use ECO.
For the non serious chess player looking for a reference work like
ECO, I would recommend either MCO-14 or Nunn's Chess Openings. They aren't as comprehensive as ECO, but they are more recent. Each of these books is also significantly cheaper than ECO.
If you are looking for compresive opening analysis, I would obtain database software - either the free SCID or a comercial program such as ChessBase 8, Chess Assistant 7.1 or Bookup2000. [As an aside I believe that BookUP and Chess Assistant also include the data from the
CAPS project, which used computers to evaluate the end positions each of the lines in ECO.]. Then I would purchase all of the informant games (which are now available in PGN), obtain the several million serious games that are downloadable from the net, and merge these games to create databases (or opening books) for the particular lines
I want to study. This receommendation would probably cost more than the $200 for ECO; however, it would be as comprehensive and completely up to date.
Lastly, if you are still set on buying the ECO volumes try to buy them used on eBay or a used book store.
Hope this was helpful
Mike Ogush.
---------
Love's always a little lonely in the beginning.
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