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BGonline.org Forums
Which book by Chris Bray should I buy?
Posted By: Timothy Chow In Response To: Which book by Chris Bray should I buy? (Chris Bray)
Date: Wednesday, 25 July 2012, at 5:37 p.m.
At Chris's own recommendation, I recently purchased Wind Assisted. So far I am happy with my purchase. Each page has an interesting position at the top followed by some discussion of it. Rollout data may be found at the back of the book.
The nature of the book means that some of the positions are geared towards beginners and intermediates and are not so interesting to a more advanced player, but there are plenty of difficult decisions to chew on, which is what I was looking for.
There is only one major flaw from my perspective: Sometimes it's not possible to determine what the decision is just from looking at the diagram. Crucially, the match score is not presented with the diagram; you have to read the text to determine it, and the process of doing so may expose you to spoilers. Also, for cube decisions, it's not always clear who's on roll. Usually the player on the near side is on roll, but I believe I've already encountered some positions where this is not the case. I think I even encountered one position where the diagram showed Black owning the cube, yet the interesting decision was not "Black on roll; cube action?" Instead, the diagram showed White on roll just after Black had taken White's cube, and the interesting cube decision was the one that had just occurred. I strongly recommend to Chris that if he publishes another book in this series, he should make it clear what the decision of interest is from the diagram alone, without forcing the reader to read the text to determine the match score or who is on roll. Even if Black is always the player with the cube decision, it can't hurt to indicate this in every diagram.
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