
The English Opening has been the subject of several ChessBase projects and I'll take some time to compare and contrast them.
In the 60-minute series we have Dejan Bojkov's Meet the English Opening in 60-minutes, which features 1...e5 and the Reversed Dragon with ...Nf6 and ...d5. This is a complete anti-1 c4 solution, of course, but to be fair, it is a system which can be played against many of White's move orders involving an early Nc3 and g3 (extremely common) and occurs in the main line 1 c4 e5 2 Nc3 Nf6 3 Nf3 Nc6 4 g3 d5 5 cxd5 Nxd5.
Of course, with the latter order White can play moves such as 4 e3, 4 d3, 4 d4, and even 4 e4 (the latter much more interesting than its frequency of use would indicate); in any case, it's not too difficult to find solutions to those in the literature.
Since I've written about the English Opening rather extensively in Volume 3 of my Mastering the Chess Openings series, I thought I'd take a look to see if a 60-minute project could compete with written theory on the same subject. It's interesting to compare Mihail Marin's massive three-volume repertoire book on the English Opening with Bojkov's and other ChessBase DVDs. In this case, the two overlap in the following line:
So Bojkov comes out very well indeed in the comparison with written theory, even within the 60-minute format.
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John Watson is an International Master from the United States. He has written over 25 books, including
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