I have to admit that I had not planned to start writing again so soon after the publication of the fi rst book, but as everybody knows the world went into the Corona pandemic which completely changed everybody’s life. After many years without playing online I began to play some online blitz on a regular basis, just to have some practice. Normally I would have played some tournaments, but at the moment of writing, nobody can say when we can start playing regular tournament chess again. Of course online chess cannot replace over-the-board chess, but it is defi nitely better than nothing. But let me now explain the idea of this second book. I will show you some 18 games with the more or less current trends in the double fianchetto. These games include some openings like the Tarrasch and the King’s Indian, just to name a few.
The main part of the book is divided into exercises and solutions, with 110 positions taken from double fi anchetto games. I have divided the exercises into chapters, with each chapter featuring games by players who have deployed the double fianchetto quite often. You will fi nd a lot of typical motifs used by these players. In this part you will also detect a few examples of play by the legendary German IM Podzielny, who died in the summer of 2019 at the legendary chess age of 64. My heart urged me to write something about him, because I knew him for a long time and he was a very special person.
The difficulty level ranges from very easy through to very tough, but I won’t give points for the solutions. The ideas vary from tactics to important strategic subtleties. The reader decides how honestly he or she tries to solve these exercises. It is also not necessary to solve all of them, but it is defi nitely important to think about these positions and take your time. The reader should gain an impression of the many ideas and structures which are possible in the double fi anchetto positions. Sometimes you will find the complete games in the solutions section, but sometimes you will only find the most important moves up to a certain point, because the rest would be irrelevant to the topic. In some solutions I also give the first moves, because I guess that it would be very interesting to know which move order was played to reach the positions in question.
Hopefully I can give the reader more input and knowledge about those preferred structures. I am sure that you will get a much better feeling for this type of position if you try to solve all the exercises and think honestly about the moves you would like to play. Some exercises will be very difficult, but don’t be down in the mouth. Th e main idea is that you try to think about the moves as if they were yours in a tournament game. The annotations in the solutions should help you to get a deeper understanding. Hopefully I found some nice examples which will be enjoyable and helpful.
Daniel Hausrath
September 2021
