The System: A World Champion's Approach to Chess

Hans Berliner is one of the most successful correspondence chess players of all time, and was utterly dominant in the 5th World Championship. Here, for the first time, he explains the set of principles - The System - that he used to guide him to the right moves. Readers will be astonished by the simplicity and power of Berliner's methods as he takes several major openings and subjects them to System principles, and finds radically new approaches to them. Hans Berliner was a correspondence chess world champion and a computer scientist.

Dr. Hans Berliner enjoyed considerable success as an over-the-board player before turning to correspondence chess, and in this form of the game, his systematic approach made him a world-beater. His lifetime score was 94 wins, 1 loss, and 10 draws. After winning the 5th World Championship by a margin of three clear points, he turned his efforts toward computer programming. He first wrote a backgammon program that beat the reigning world champion in 1979, then he moved on to chess programming. His Hitech program won the World Computer Championship twice and was one of the first programs to score good results against top-level human players.