The Italian Game is the front-line of modern chess. After a hundred years of oblivion, in the 21st century, it edged out many other renowned openings, and is employed today by all the world’s top players. Its modern interpretation is full of new ideas, and its theory has grown thanks to the research of modern grandmasters. This book is an attempt to comprehend the current state of this opening.
The book, however, is not just a collection of lines of this fashionable opening. Its main idea is to demonstrate the key ideas and typical techniques in various opening positions, with every key idea being highlighted in the text. The manual can thus be used as a strategy textbook in Italian-type positions; it even includes a special section called ‘The Italian Endgame’.
A separate chapter is devoted to one the most important problems of modern chess, that is, getting similar positions of the Italian type from other openings.
The book should be of interest to players of various strengths.
This Guioco Piano for the 20th century is the subject of The Modernized Italian Game. Authored by grandmaster Alexander Kalinin and Correspondence grandmaster Nikolai Kalinchenko, this thick tome is part instructional manual and part theoretical work. Unlike The Modernized Ruy Lopez, the material here is organized around model games, 128 of them in all. Like Swiercz’s book, there is a fair amount of prose to instruct and orient the reader.
The Modernized Italian Game ends with short chapters on the Guioco setup (Bc4, Nf3 and pawns on e4, d3 and c3) and examines how it can also crop up in the Two Knights Defense, Philidor Defense and Bishop’s Opening. Examples of the latter two are 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 d6 3.Bc4 (played by a young Gary Kasparov) and 1.e4 e5 2.Bc4 Nf6 3.d3, which aims for the Guioco Piano while sidestepping the Petroff Defense.
IM John Donaldson - April 2021.
