En bok om Colle-systemene der hvit starter med d4, Sf3, e3 og c3 eller b3. Som forfatteren påpeker, har åpningen et litt mindre seriøst ry, selv om det er den høyst respekterte svartåpningen Slavisk dronninggambit med ett tempo mer...

Det er en både aktuell, fyldig og lettlest bok der forfatteren gjennom drøyt 400 sider presenterer seriøst stoff på en tildels billedrik, muntlig måte. Han dekker mest det vi kaller vanlig Colle-system med c3 fra hvit, med mange ulike oppstillinger fra svarts side, men har også et 40 siders kapittel om det folkelig populære Colle-Zukertort-systemet der hvit spiller b3 i stedet for c3.

Starten av forordet lyder slik:

An Orphaned Opening

If you go back in time to the Palaeolithic age and accidentally step on a resting prehistoric dragonfly, would the world be completely altered when you returned to the present? The Colle System’s tragedy is that its founding father, Edgar Colle, died very young, only in his thirties, and with his passing the artery of our opening’s lineage and pedigree was mortally severed. I can’t help but speculate that perhaps his beloved system would be more popular today had he lived a long life, producing many more Colle System masterpieces for the opening’s portfolio. For something to reach a level of greatness, there must correspond- ingly also be history behind it. With Edgar Colle’s premature death, our opening lost a chunk of its history, its potential obliterated with his passing.

My old friend and student of Colle himself, the late IM George Koltanowski, faithfully kept his teacher’s opening barely alive – on life support – realizing it needed a strong GM advocate to truly popularize the system. This is how our opening earned such low-brand recognition and why so many consider it no more than a by-product of chess history’s rub- bish bin. I wrote in Kramnik: Move by Move : “The Colle and its cousin, the London System, tend to be scapegoated as second rate, milquetoast openings, when in reality, they are not.” The Colle is anything but a spontaneous friend with an amusing personality. Instead, we meet a companion reliably straightforward, loyal and comfortably uniform in tem- perament, arriving at solid Semi-Slav positions a move up. The secret to mastering the Colle is to learn to see the opening through alien eyes – namely, the vastly popular Semi-Slav triangle formation. How is it, I ask, (quite rationally!) that an opening a move down (the Semi-Slav) is well respected and popular, while the other, the same position a move up (our beloved Colle) is often the object of contempt? I hope to impart to you the hidden understanding that the Colle is actually a powerful open- ing weapon, which arguably should be on parwith blue-blooded counterparts such as the Ruy Lopez and Slav. The tale of the three diagrams is tabiya positions from Chapters One and Two. In both we play White in what is normally a Black opening – the Semi-Slav – but up a full move. These are specialty positions, which may be honed even further by studying traditional Black Semi-Slav variations. So we may be tricking our opponent into a Semi-Slav (which he likely doesn’t know or play with the black pieces) and get this position a full move up over normal, since we arrive here with White, not Black.