by Alexey Dreev

The Meran Variation is an extremely dynamic opening, and its no coincidence that it belongs to the opening repertoire of geniusses such as Kasparov, Kramnik, Anand and Shirov. The lines arising after 1 d4 d5 2 c4 c6 3 Nc3 Nf6 4 Nf3 e6 5 e3 Nbd7 6 Bd3 dxc4 7 Bxc4 b5 often are of a very sharp nature, and Black's good possibilities for active counterplay make this choice a popular weapon on all chess levels. With Alexey Dreev, now for the first time an absolute world class player and specialist has taken on this opening for ChessBase.

The former youth world champion and manyfold candidate for the world championship has compiled well over 930 games, 35 of which saw himself at the board. More than 500 games are annotated. Dreev himself has provided comments on 116 encounters and another 41 are explained by German grandmaster Christopher Lutz, also a top expert on the Meran. The big database (about 5300 games) and the variation tree featuring all games have become standard with all ChessBase opening CDs. Fillet piece of the CD is the training database. The 20 sample games, assorted according to variations and accessible by index, contain up to 13 training questions each.