In many treatments of the opening, White runs slight risks--doubled pawns and an isolated queen pawn are typical.  At the peak of world chess, there is thus a clear preference for the Classical System 4.Qc2--in which White usually retains the bishop pair and the pawn structure remains intact; however on some occasions it is necessary to make up for being behind in development.

The author, Knut Neven, has produced an easily comprehensible database with 24 texts and 478 selected and mainly annotated games.  After an introduction and a history of the system and opening, there comes a specially interesting text about typical motifs which crop up in the Classical System:  the advantage of the bishop pair, the placement of the minor pieces, recurring tactical motifs, key pawn structures and pressure against c4 are themes which the author explains and provides with links to sample games.

Features:

• Opening theory of the Classical System in 18 chapters
• Large reference database of nearly 23,000 games, of which approximately 1000 are annotated
• Training database
• Extensive opening tree, generated from all the games
• All the data accessed with a reader based on ChessBase 9.0

Nute Neven is the editor of the Canadian chess magazine "En Passant."  His principal playing activities are in the realm of correspondence chess, where he has already qualified three times for the final of the IECG World Championship.  ChessBase has already published his works on the French Defense with 3.Nc3 and French Defense without Nc3 as well as the Grunfeld Defense.

Specifications:

• System Requirements:
• Pentium, 32 MB RAM, Win98 SE, WinME, Win2000, WinXP