| www.chesspublishing.com Up until recently, chess players had two ways that they could study openings. The time honored traditional method was to use books and more recently, database programs like ChessBase. Now the English company Chesspublishing.com has created a third method incorporating the structure of a book with the flexibility and up-to-date characteristics of a database. Chesspublishing.com and its stable of Grandmaster contributors, which includes John Fedorowicz, Paul Motwani, Chris Ward and Ruslan Sherbakov, offer the reader electronic opening books that are updated every month and feature feedback from subscribers. The material is presented in a variety of formats, including downloads and PGN files. Each author is responsible for a fairly broad range of openings or topical variations. The noted Dragon expert Chris Ward covers not only his specialty, but also the Accelerated Dragon and the Hyper-Accelerated Dragon. You�d expect Ward to heavily weight the Dragon as it is more popular and is also the subject of several books by him. This turns out to be the case, but there are also some interesting ideas in the other lines he covers. For example, in the move order 1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 g6 3.d4 cxd4 4.Qxd4 Nf6 he shows that black is doing just fine and that if you want to avoid the Rossolimo and play the Accelerated Dragon, this could be your cup of tea. And why would Ward want to play the Accelerated? Principally to duck the lines in the Dragon where White castles long and delays playing Bc4. If White answers his Accelerated Dragon move order with Nc3 and Bc4, he steers back to the Dragon. Ward�s coverage of the Anti-Maroczy line with an early �Nxd4 is quite good. Examining Ward�s site, it�s clear that Chesspublishing.com is not a stand-alone product. You want to use it in conjunction with conventional opening books. Think of it as an opening book that is constantly being updated each month. If it�s used in this manner, it will be quite helpful, I wouldn�t count on it as your sole source of information for an opening, but it can be an excellent way to not only stay on top of things, but also pick up new lines to play. Amateur players will especially benefit from the wealth of well-annotated games featuring lots of prose explanations. Chesspublishing.com offers the choice of subscribing to individual openings or getting the whole package for a very reasonable cost. A single site costs $18 a year, three sites cost $36 a year, and a gold card costs $70. In future reviews I will deal with other authors on this site. |