According to Amazon there's an upcoming new book, to be published on Dec. 20th 2019 by IM Gerard Welling and FM Steve Giddins!
The title is:
"Side-stepping Mainline Theory: Cut Down on Chess Opening Study and Get a Middlegame You are Familiar With"
And this is the description of it:
"The average chess player spends too much time on studying opening
theory. In his day, World Champion Emanuel Lasker argued that improving
amateurs should spend about 5% of their study time on openings. These
days club players are probably closer to 80%, often focusing on opening
lines that are popular among grandmasters. Club players shouldn't
slavishly copy the choices of grandmasters. GMs need to squeeze every
drop of advantage from the opening and therefore play highly complex
lines that require large amounts of memorization. The main necessity for
club players is to emerge from the opening with a reasonable position,
from which you can simply play chess and pit your own tactical and
positional understanding against that of your opponent. Gerard Welling
and Steve Giddins recommend the Old Indian-Hanham Philidor set-up as a
basis for both Black and White. They provide ideas and strategies that
can be learned in the shortest possible time and require the bare
minimum of maintenance and updating. They deliver exactly what you need:
rock-solid positions that you know how to handle. By adopting a similar
set-up for both colours, with similar plans and techniques, you further
reduce study time. With this compact and straightforward opening
approach, Welling and Giddins argue, club players will have more time to
focus on what is really decisive in the vast majority of
non-grandmaster games: tactics, positional understanding and endgame
technique."
