Just to clear up some confusion, my remarks about Tom Wirth's book were meant as a rave review. I have profited immensely from the book, and I know other people will gain a great deal of knowledge from it. The material is beautifully presented.
I framed my review as an exercise in irony--that is, I tried to point out the virtues of the book by demonstrating that if you looked for something negative to say about it you had to really dig deep. That was the reason for my complaining about the five days it took for the book to arrive. My point was that if someone delivers something to you in five days, he is pretty prompt about his delivery. Of course my suggestion of losing fifty dollars every two weeks to a superior player in order to pick up one or two points a week when you could just send Tom the fifty dollars and have a complete collection of them in a few days was meant to show how much more sensible buying CONTROLLED AGGRESSION was as a path to increasing your knowledge than the traditional, but expensive and slow path, of matching up with superior players.
As for calling Tom a "Snitch," one man's snitch is another man's "teacher." I was, again in a backwards way, making the point that with CONTROLLED AGGRESSION Tom had joined the ranks of admirable people like Bob Byrne and Freddy Bentivegna who had broken the taboo that anyone who had advanced knowledge about our game was unwilling to impart it, except at great cost, to those who did not.
To put it clearly: If you don't buy this book, expect to lose lots of games to opponents who did buy it.
I framed my review as an exercise in irony--that is, I tried to point out the virtues of the book by demonstrating that if you looked for something negative to say about it you had to really dig deep. That was the reason for my complaining about the five days it took for the book to arrive. My point was that if someone delivers something to you in five days, he is pretty prompt about his delivery. Of course my suggestion of losing fifty dollars every two weeks to a superior player in order to pick up one or two points a week when you could just send Tom the fifty dollars and have a complete collection of them in a few days was meant to show how much more sensible buying CONTROLLED AGGRESSION was as a path to increasing your knowledge than the traditional, but expensive and slow path, of matching up with superior players.
As for calling Tom a "Snitch," one man's snitch is another man's "teacher." I was, again in a backwards way, making the point that with CONTROLLED AGGRESSION Tom had joined the ranks of admirable people like Bob Byrne and Freddy Bentivegna who had broken the taboo that anyone who had advanced knowledge about our game was unwilling to impart it, except at great cost, to those who did not.
To put it clearly: If you don't buy this book, expect to lose lots of games to opponents who did buy it.
