Dragon for Experts

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The Dragon for Experts

07/15/01

This offering from Chessbase arrived a few weeks ago, and I just recently got the opportunity to look at it. This CD was authored by IM Attila Schneider, and is slightly different from the other Chessbase opening CDs that I have examined. Specifically, there are no training examples, no multimedia, and no introductory explanations about how to play this opening. So this is not the best choice if you want to learn the Dragon from the ground up.

That being said, I do believe that this makes a good choice for those that already play the dragon. The sample of games that I looked at had decent annotations, and I believe a fair amount of sweat and toil went into creating the CD. The emphasis is of course on the critical Yugoslav attack, but other variations are covered as well. The starting point for enumerating black's choices depends largely on white's development choices (i.e. hypermodern, classical or Yugoslav-type setup), and all these are discussed in great detail.

Like other Chessbase CDs, there are theoretical databases, game databases, and an opening tree. The game database contains about 9300 games, of which 683 are annotated. Most games are from the mid-80s onward, with 639 games from the 2000-2001 tournament season (most of the latter category are from 2000).

The theoretical database has very detailed explanations, and is a good example of how one should go about annotating this type of database. For example, there are many times when one purchases an opening book, and an assessment is given for a position, with no justification of why. Thankfully, this is not the case with this CD, and most assessments are explained.

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