Make your chessboard a special gift
Add a personal engraving or gift wrapping with one click. You can remove these extras anytime in the cart.
This Yearbook 118: Chess Opening News (hardcover) is a hardcover chess opening yearbook focused on recent theory, new ideas and practical work for players who want to keep their repertoire up to date. It brings together surveys, forum discussion, regular columns, reviews and exercises in one volume.
What’s in this issue
This 118th issue combines several ways of working with openings. Alongside detailed surveys, it also includes a forum section, regular columns, book reviews and a set of exercises, so it is more than a simple overview of variations. It is designed to support real repertoire building and a better understanding of the positions that arise after the opening.
The Forum section includes a lively discussion about the right to attach your own name to opening variations, the announcement of the Novelty of the Year 2015 winner, and theoretical articles by authors such as Bogdan Lalic, Luis Rodi and José Vilela.
In the Columns section, American grandmaster Joel Benjamin examines positions with an isolated queen’s pawn in different openings in Repertoire Building with Benjamin. Alexey Kuzmin’s Kuzmin’s Harvest looks at opening ideas tested by the world’s leading players at Tata Steel.
The Reviews section covers important opening books, including Grandmaster Repertoire: The Dragon, Volumes 1 and 2 by Gawain Jones, Understanding the Queen’s Gambit Accepted by Alexander Delchev and Semko Semkov, The Scandinavian by David Smerdon, and The Double Queen’s Gambit by Alexey Bezgodov.
Opening theory in depth
The largest part of the yearbook is made up of surveys, or broad studies of specific opening lines. This issue covers material from 1.e4, 1.d4 and English Opening systems.
At the end of the publication, you will find more than 75 practical opening exercises that help test whether the analysis has really been understood and whether the right moves can be found over the board. That makes this issue especially useful for readers who want to turn theory into active training.
Yearbook 118: Chess Opening News (hardcover) is part of the New In Chess Yearbook series and is a strong choice for players, coaches and ambitious amateurs working on their opening repertoire. It is the kind of publication you can return to both when preparing for a specific opponent and when developing your openings over the longer term.
Key details
- Product type: chess opening yearbook
- Format: hardcover edition
- Series: New In Chess Yearbook
- Content: chess opening news and theory
- Main sections: opening surveys, forum section, regular columns, book reviews and practical exercises
- Practice material: more than 75 practical opening exercises
- Audience: players, coaches and ambitious amateurs
- Use: opening preparation, repertoire building, training and tournament preparation
Tangible precision
Each move strengthens curiosity, concentration, and self-confidence.

