A good book on the Colle System has been desperately needed for a long time. Why? Because this opening is a mainstay in the repertoires of tens of thousands of amateurs. The old Koltanowski book (for years the only source of information on this system) is awful (sorry Kolty!), and the Colle books by Soltis are also nothing but garbage. Winning With the Colle, however, is a completely different animal.

A simple comparison is enough to make a deep impression. The Soltis book on the Koltanowski line (where White plays for an e3-e4 advance) has about a dozen pages of analysis. ECO has far less (though Soltis' pages are mostly virgin white...unstained by the presence of ink). Winning With the Colle has over fifty pages on this line (also exploring Black tries to enter other openings like the Grunfeld, Slav, Reversed Queen's Gambit and Queen Fianchettos).

However, the numbers (vastly in favor of Winning With the Colle) are not the only way to appreciate this book. The fact that the authors have also gone out of their way to offer some original suggestions also puts this work on the "must buy" list.

Yes, more original games could have been found. And yes, many key questions in this opening have been avoided (though the authors may not have been aware of them). But overall, this is the only book you should buy if you wish to study this very popular system of development. Simply put: it's light-years ahead of anything else on this subject!