De Santis - The Hippopotamus Defence

Mikhail Tal's splendid account of his world championship match victory is one of the masterpieces of the golden age of annotation-before insights and feelings and flashes of genius were reduced to mere moves and Informant symbols. This is simply the best book written about a world championship match by a contestant. That shouldn't be a surprise because Tal was the finest writer to become world champion.-International Grandmaster and popular chess columnistAndy Soltis

• With the Opening Intro_Impressum you have fast access to all openings and can easily navigate to your favorite branches: The Menu offers opening names sorting all opening-articles for fast and easy access to your favorite openings. Of course, you still can find all opening articles using the “ECO List” tab as well.
• Opening Tutorials: What Openings are established in chess and how do I find the right ones according to my preferences? Let yourself get inspired by the new opening overview and pick your favorite lines for your Chess Repertoire!
• 70 Videos included in the Encyclopaedia 2023 (total running time: 29 hours): High-class annotated opening videos from popular ChessBase Authors as Daniel King, Mihail Marin, Jan Werle, Erwin l’Ami, Nicholas Pert and many others.
• Professional Opening Analysis by Grandmasters & International Masters: Ideas for your Repertoire offers many suggestions to all well-established openings. The number of articles in the Opening Encyclopedia is growing – it contains now 1,396!
• The Games Database with 40,000 games, contains all games from every one of the 1,396 opening articles. You find the Database on the left menu under the tab “Games database”.
• 384 new & revised Opening Surveys by Grandmaster & opening specialist Lubomir Ftacnik, with 7,444 surveys in total!
• If you like to know more about a certain opening, you can click on the link “Related Products in the ChessBase Shop” (under the headline of any article) to list suitable DVDs in the ChessBase Shop related to the opening. Or click on the author’s name to see his publications with ChessBase.

Rook endgames are the most frequently recurring endgames and also one of the most exciting areas of chess, with mind bending tactical opportunities and dizzying nuances available. They have unsurprisingly been a big topic in endgame literature, with a heavy focus on the set theoretical positions and their logic and fixed conclusions (see the excellent Theoretical Rook Endgames by GM Sam Shankland, published as a sister volume to this book as the peak example of this).

Conceptual Rook Endgames goes in a different direction. Focused on two dozen major concepts, the book explains the mechanisms of rook endgames in a novel way, by building foundations with simple examples, which can be seen in the most complicated examples as well. Rook endgames will remain rich and surprising, as they are for the greats, but armed with this book, your comprehension of them will skyrocket.

Grandmaster Jacob Aagaard is the most talented chess writer of his generation. He won the British Championship in 2007, but is mostly known for his multi-award winning books and his work with students that have won club, country, state, national, continental and world championships, as well as Olympiad golds (board and overall), the World Cup and Candidates tournament. Hardcover. 416 p.