Should opening books be allowed?

Musikamole, if you ask one more question I'm going to call the police on Ziryab.

 Oh my, that was brilliant play.    How many opponents do you think have smoke pouring out their ears after getting hornswoggled by the silly opening.

  Fair enough. I will only post that which enlightens the chess community, contributes to the body of knowledge, followed by long winded dissertations on the meaning of chess, life, the universe and everything. I think that about sums it up.

A quick search of games since 2001 played by GMs with both players' ratings over 2700 in the ECO codes C01 to C19 (French Defense) produced 269 games. I can print these in a repertoire tree, but it requires 38 sheets of paper.

The deepest I've ever followed another game in correspondence chess was move 24 (from a book on the closed Spanish). In the French, we nearly always leave "book" by move 14. Against most of my local OTB opponents, our French games are in book 10-12 moves in. See "French Defense!" for an illustrative game where my opponent deviated on move 11 to his peril. One week later, he was in the same position in a casual game against another player (both had read my blog).

My games usually stay in book 6-8 moves, but I also don't play the most mainstream openings. When I do play very mainstream openings (Closed Ruy Lopez as black, for instance), I sometimes stay in book as much as 14-15 moves. But even when we deviate from book in correspondence games, I'll sometimes study the moves of a few complete master games in similar positions, just to get a better feel for the overall plans, even though the move order will be different.

--Fromper

 Very nice annotation. A good read.

سالفل

False, correspondence chess has not existed that long. 😁

False

In the 18th century, Frederick the Great (1712-1786) played a correspondence game with his early tutor, Voltaire (1694-1778), by royal courier between Berlin and Paris.

Correspondence games took place earlier. Many such games in the 1800's took place, becoming very popular at the end of the century.

In asking why are books allowed ...?  A not so trivial point is chess engines did not exist when protocols were made. 2nd. Many of the matches were Club vs Club or Country vs Country, where the match was a Team event. and players could select moves by consensus.

Most often cited is "it can't be prevented" as the leading reason. A distortion. There are sites, which offer the opportunity to play by gentleman's agreement - no books. Cheating the rules can be done at any time control, any format. It is assumed players will be ethical.