Rating: 
Summary: Excellent!!!
Review: If you're stuck on your rating then this book will help you improve vastly. I recommend you to go through your games with this book on your side. That will help you enormously. This book is a must in every chess players library!
Rating: 
Summary: This hefty tome is useful but not for the faint of heart.
Review: John Nunn and his team of experts have put together an impressive one volume opening text. The concerted effort of the authors to update and revise previous opening classifications may be the book's most attractive draw. The space constraints are obvious, however. The introduction is two pages long, and there is no name index. Beginners may be overwhelmed. Intermediate players, on the other hand, will find the compendium useful but lacking in pedagogy. However, the space constraints may be most disappointing to expert players. They may take exception to Nunn's decision to include only the "most viable" lines.
Rating:
Summary: Requires work on your part in order to be useful
Review: The general sentiment that I've read about this book is correct: there is little in the way of explicit explanations as to which line is better. What this means is that you will not be spoon-fed reasons why a given line is better for white or black; you'll have to do the legwork yourself through an analysis of the position.Frankly, I wouldn't have it any other way. People often complain that many books don't give "the ideas" behind openings, but the truth is that there are so many ideas that the truth of a position can't be summed up with a one-liner like "White is better because of his active bishops". It's only though analysis of typical positions that arise from your favorite openings that you will understand the complexities that arise from said openings. Before buying this book, I recommend playing until you consider yourself to be at an intermediate level in the fields of tactics, analysis and strategy before buying this book.
Rating:
Summary: At long last an up to date openings guide
Review: The long-awaited replacement for the ancient Batsford Chess Openings II, and Modern Chess Openings 13 has finally arived in the form of NCO. This is a huge work -- some 540 pages in length and densely packed with material. Devotees of BCO will be instantly familiar with the column and note layout which is absolutely identical. One thing they have improved over BCO is that the openings have been place exactly in the order in which they can be found in the Encyclopedia of Chess Openings. If you know, for instance, that the Mar del Plata variations of the King's Indian Defense have an ECO code of E99, then you know to go directly to the back of the book. Critics have made the point that modern chess opening theory has become so advanced that a one-volume compendium just can't cover all the major variations convincingly. This may be true, and with the advent of databases and laptop PCs, NCO may be of limited usefulness to GMs, but to those of us down here in Patzerland it is often difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff and determine which among 1.2 million are the seminal games in a given variation. NCO tells us and provides an excellent starting-point for any db search. If you are a serious tournament competitor under USCF 2400, this book is for you. It's not inexpensive at $30, but will almost certainly assume a front-and-center position among all you chess reference works. I just hope that we do not have to wait another decade for a replacement...
Rating:
Summary: A very good openings book
Review: This book is quite good because it has very easy to read tables and footnotes, you can tell at a glance what the main lines are.
Very good coverege of most main lines.
Buy It!
Rating:
Summary: The Best One-Volume Opening Guide in Existence
Review: This is IT! Excuse my Anglocentrism, but I can't help noticing that a whole lot of very good chess books are coming out of England, many of them produced by the four authors of this fine work. I don't expect to see anything better among books of this type before the revised edition of this book comes out. Each author is an expert on the openings he analyses in this book and the entire book is computer-checked for accuracy. It won't make monographs on specific openings and variations obsolete, but this book quickly made me forget about MCO, BCO or any of the other one-volume opening guides.
Rating:
Summary: The Opening Book for the Serious Student
Review: This is the "GrandMaster" of opening books. I am a Master and I teach chess for a living. When my students want to learn an opening, or need a one volume reference for learning new openings, this is the book I recommend to them. A "MUST" for the Postal player! There is more information and fewer mistakes in this book, than any opening compendium I have ever seen! WARNING: If you are a casual chess player, or looking for for a book to help you improve and learn something, this is not the book you seek. This is a book for very serious chess players. If you have never used an opening book before, you will find this book a very difficult "read." Its just lines and recommendations for what is best in the openings. There are a great deal of symbols and lines that end with an evaluation like "White is slightly better." There is nothing that explains why White is better. Unless this type of dialogue would be useful to you, you are better off not buying this book.
Rating:
Summary: The Opening Book for the Serious Student
Review: This is the "GrandMaster" of opening books. I am a Master and I teach chess for a living. When my students want to learn an opening, or need a one volume reference for learning new openings, this is the book I recommend to them. A "MUST" for the Postal player! There is more information and fewer mistakes in this book, than any opening compendium I have ever seen! WARNING: If you are a casual chess player, or looking for for a book to help you improve and learn something, this is not the book you seek. This is a book for very serious chess players. If you have never used an opening book before, you will find this book a very difficult "read." Its just lines and recommendations for what is best in the openings. There are a great deal of symbols and lines that end with an evaluation like "White is slightly better." There is nothing that explains why White is better. Unless this type of dialogue would be useful to you, you are better off not buying this book.
Rating:
Summary: Best for expert players
Review: This is the best opening book for serious chess players. However, in the last year I personally have noticed that Black doesn't have to play certain moves after White does. In other words, the opening White chooses does not necessarily "force" Black to choose the "appropriate" defense. Also, even if Black plays a certain defense according to what White opens with, White can still obliterate Blacks middlegame defensive plans, often with just one move! For example, in the Benoni defense, Black wants the pawn structure to be his pawns at d4 and c5, with a White pawn cradled in d5. This is advantageous for Black, not for White. After Black plays c5, in one move White can commit the cardinal sin of trading a center pawn for a side pawn (d4xc5), but that completely wipes out the Benoni! Most defenses can be negated this way, and if the Black player is not an expert, he will be lost as to what to do. So, for intermediate players of up to 1800 ranking like me, what do we do when we play Black? Do we passively mirror White's opening with the "correct" defense? Do we act like a monkey waiting for the master's next move? No, I say! We initiate counterplay on the kingside! Everyone knows that an open center is very dangerous for Black, since White has the first move and therefore the initiative. Only expert players can have a winning record playing Black with an open center. The lower the ranking, the worse the player tends to do playing Black with an open center. The Benoni partially closes the center, but like I described above, it can be negated easily. A better defense is the King's Indian Defense, of which several pages in NCO is dedicated. This closes up the center nicely, but kingside counterplay by Black is inhibited by the knight residing on f6. Why not move the knight to e7? Then later after castling kingside, an f6-f5 pawn advance can be prepared. I firmly believe that the most important square in the game FOR BOTH SIDES is e5. Whoever controls e5 will usually win the game. If Black controls e5 by first preparing f6 e6 d6, then e5, White cannot control e5 if his knight is on f3, since he cannot advance his f pawn to f4 to help his center pawns. After that, Black can take his time moving major pieces to the kingside. Supposedly its a huge mistake to develop pawns before pieces. But if the center is closed, White's pieces outside the pawn chain become a liability, not an asset. Try this variation of the KID...you may be surprised by the results.
Rating:
Summary: A large source for the intermediate player
Review: Thousands of lines of play including tentative and uncommon openings. I have found some instances of transpositions the author won't point to the reader. But this is a minor drawback. This book will fullfill the needs of the intermediate player who intends to become a master.
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