Do you need to freshen up your opening repertoire? Choose Dangerous Weapons and amaze your opponents with new and exciting opening ideas!

In this book, three leading experts take a revolutionary look at two popular and closely related openings: the Pirc and the Modern. Instead of analysing the well-trodden main lines they concentrate on fresh or little-explored variations, selecting a wealth of 'dangerous' options for both colours. Whether playing White or Black, a study of this book will leave you confident and fully-armed, and your opponents running for cover!

Dangerous Weapons is a series of opening books which supply the reader with an abundance of hard-hitting ideas to revitalize his or her opening repertoire. Many of the carefully chosen weapons are innovative, visually shocking, incredibly tricky, or have been unfairly discarded. They are guaranteed to throw even your most experienced opponents off balance.

• The Pirc and Modern as never seen before
• Packed with original ideas and analysis
• An armory of weapons to shock your opponents

Preface

The Pirc and the Modern are two of Black's more dynamic defences to 1 e4. Both openings are also enjoying something of a renaissance of late. Indeed, over the past couple of years they have been employed quite often by such players as Ivanchuk, Mamedyarov, Morozevich and Svidler. Thus it made good sense to introduce the Pirc and the Modern into the Dangerous Weapons series.

I am delighted to say that much of this book is by two leading Pirc and Modern exponents, Colin McNab and James Vigus. They are, of course, also noted theoreticians: Colin co-authored the authoritative The Ultimate Pirc with John Nunn back in 1998, while more recently James has won over many to the black cause with his The Pirc in Black and White. For this project, James contributed chapters 1, 2, 5 and 12; Colin was responsible for chapters 3, 9, 10 and 11; and I wrote the rest: chap­ters 4,6, 7 and 8.

I hope that the existing Pirc/Modern player will find much of interest in this work, as well as those yet to take up either opening. Your authors have aimed to pro­duce a mini-repertoire for Black against most of White's main tries, while also covering a few dangerous and quite complex ideas for White. As usual this work wouldn't have come about without the help of various people, and we would like to especially acknowledge the assistance of Mark Nieuweboer and Jos Woolley.

Richard Palliser,

York & Norton-sub-Hamdon,

March 2009

Content:
005 Preface

006 Series Introduction

009 1 Castling into the Argentinean Attack

(1 e4 d6 2 d4 Nf6 3 Nc3 g6 4 Be3 Bg7 5 Qd2 0-0 6 0-0-0)

032 2 Castling into the 150 Attack

(1 e4 d6 2 d4 Nf6 3 Nc3 g6 4 Be3 Bg7 5 Qd2 0-0 6 others)

051 3 A Neglected Approach in the Classical

(1 e4 d6 2 d4 Nf6 3 Nc3 g6 4 Nf3 Bg7 5 Be2 0-0 6 0-0 c6 7 Bf4)

063 4 Benjamin's Flexible 6...e6

(1 e4 d6 2 d4 Nf6 3 Nc3 g6 4 Nf3 Bg7 5 Be2 0-0 6 0-0 e6)

086 5 A Cunning Sidestep

(1 e4 d6 2 d4 Nf6 3 Nc3 g6 4 f4 Bg7 5 Nf3 c5 6 Bb5+ Bd7 7 e5 Ng4 8 e6 Bxb5 9 exf7+ Kf8)

100 6 The Delayed Spike

(1 e4 d6 2 d4 Nf6 3 Nc3 g6 4 Be2 Bg7 5 Be3 0-0 6 g4)

127 7 Not the 150 Attack!

(1 e4 d6 2 d4 Nf6 3 Nc3 g6 4 Be2 Bg7 5 Be3 c6 6 Qd2)

145 8 Spicing up the Fianchetto Variation

(1 e4 d6 2 d4 Nf6 3 Nc3 g6 4 g3 Bg7 5 Bg2 0-0 6 Nge2 e5 7 h3 a6)

161 9 Meeting 4 Bg5 in Dragon Style

(1 e4 g6 2 d4 Bg7 3 Nc3 d6 4 Bg5 Nd7)

173 10 Blunting White's Bishop on c4

(1 e4 g6 2d4 Bg7 3 Nf3 d6 4 Bc4 e6)

188 11 An Early Lunge

(1 e4 g6 2 h4)

200 12 Trumping a Tricky Transposition

(1 e4 d6 2 d4 Nf6 3 f3 c5)

221 Index of Variations

224 Index of Games