Opening Instructor

By Kalinichenko

Published by Convekta

This is a perfect opening manual. The program features a theoretical review of all the common chess openings, which are illustrated by instructive games of the chess players in the 19th and 20th centuries. This compact opening manual contains a detailed classification, which makes it useful to players of any level - beginners, intermediate, and advanced players. Each opening is supplied with evaluations and characteristics of key moves. The history of the variations' development is described, as well as the current status. The theoretic material is nicely illustrated by classic games with detailed annotations that demonstrate the principal ideas and plans for each variation for black and white. The program allows users to add, edit and the chess material, to analyze positions and to play against the built-in crafty, delfi, and dragon engines, to find games and positions according to complex criteria, to find the strongest moves in test mode, and much more!

This CD presents detailed information on nearly all the openings that you will ever encounter. You may not find guidance for every conceivable opening as that would be nearly impossible, but you will find top quality analysis and classic games for most of the openings and definitely all the common ones. The complete list of the openings covered by the "Opening Instructor" can be found 'here'.

The material on the CD is organized by a 'tree' structure - common in many Convekta products.  Here games are broken into three main categories: open, closed and semi-open games. Within these three categories, you'll find the individual opening names listed where double-clicking one of the names will produce a list of the relevant information and games. The organization is pretty easy to figure out so there should be no problem quickly finding what you are looking for.

Below you can see a bit of the list of the openings that are covered in the semi-open games. The opening classifier is shown there on the top right, while the explanatory text for the highlighted branch of the opening classifier is shown on the lower left. Below the opening classifier you can see a list of informational texts and games that are included in the semi-open games category.

This CD has 336 informational texts and annotated games which cover all the openings. Here is an example of a typical annotated game from this program.

Over all, this CD is not as in depth as a book dedicated to one opening by a specialist in that opening, but this is a perfect tool for learning several or many openings!

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS: IBM-compatible PC, 64 Mb RAM, Hard Disk 200 Mb, of free disk space, Windows 2000/NT/ME/XP/2003, CD-ROM drive. No additional software is required.

NSG rating = 9.4 of 10