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Rating: 
Summary: The BEST book on this sharp line!
Review: Do you play the Botvinnik Gambit? Are you a club player or a correspondence player and you are looking for a good line to play? Do you play in tournaments? Do you enjoy sharp and highly tactical chess? Do you want to study (and play?) one of the most exciting lines in all of chess opening praxis? If you answered yes to any of these questions, then this book may be for you. First let me say something about the quality of this book, since many times in chess books, this is "iffy" at best. First-rate flex-cover, opaque pages, very good and clear diagrams, indexes, a good font, the main lines are in bold, etc. (Gambit publications usually does a more than adequate job here.) Secondly, I GREATLY enjoy the book. (I don't play these lines, a student purchased this copy for me so we could study the opening together.) It is very well laid out. There is an introduction where the author covers some of the basic ideas of the whole variation, from the endings, to general ideas, outposts, sacrifices in this variation etc. (This is an area missed by many chess books, especially books on the opening.) The author then begins with the main line of this variation:
(Chapter One, 17. a3.) He covers all of these lines thoroughly and in great detail. Then there are ELEVEN! (11) chapters that cover virtually every line and every variation that this opening generally encompasses. Then you get a BONUS: The author covers the "Moscow Variation." (Bg5, h6!?) This is a very close relative, but many books on the Botvinnik line DON'T cover the Moscow Variation, but Pedersen very thoughtfully has. Most of the coverage in this book is excellent and in great depth. Virtually every line and every variation is covered in depth. Every player - from a weekend warrior, to the seasoned Master - will find the coverage in this book sufficient. Now to a few things wrong with this book. NO player index. How are you supposed to find your favorite player? (There is a very detailed index of the variations, however.) There are also NO deeply annotated games in this book. (In fact, almost no complete games of any kind.) Personally, if I am a 'class player' trying to learn this opening, I would benefit greatly from 5-10 briefly annotated games at the end of each chapter. The layout of the book is a little dense and the numbering of the variations is a little obscure. (A223, page # 95) Some of the analysis of a few of the sub-variations feature parenthesis within parenthesis ... and I have always found this a little hard to follow. But despite my criticisms, this is a good book. It is MUCH superior to the average opening book on the market today, even the editor and proofreader of this project did a good job. (I found very few errors of any kind.) If you play these lines in tournaments or postal chess, then you will simply HAVE to have this book. (If you don't, you are going to drop a lot of points to the people who do!)
Rating: 
Summary: Good work
Review: Pedersen has surpassed himself. This is a timely coverage of a topical opening. Upto now I've been using Wells' 'The Complete Semi-Slav' which itself deserves accolades. However it is beginning to show its age since it came out about five years ago. A book on the Semi-Slav by Sadler came out 3 years ago, but though not bad, it can't be called a treatise. It was oriented towards the average club player. The book by Pedersen gives all the latest dope on some of the most critical and fashionable lines, and does a good job of explaining what's going on. This is no database dump. The author has devoted a lot of thought to the lines and taken pains to explain his thinking. To give but one example, there's 23 pages devoted to the Anti-Moscow variation: 1.d4 d5 2.c4 c6 3.Nf3 Nf6 4.Nc3 e6 5.Bg5 h6 6.Bh4 dc. This line gets about a page-and-a-half of coverage in Wells (the line wasn't so much in vogue at the time).
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