I'm Carsten Hansen. I'm 35 years old, a FIDE Master since 1990, Danish, but left Denmark in 1996 in connection with my dayjob in the shipping industry and have since lived in Miami, London, Los Angeles and the last four years just outside New York.

I played chess full time in 1991, had some decent results, but not enough to keep at it. So instead I took up writing about chess and have to date had five books published: The Sicilian Accelerated Dragon (Batsford 1998 - out of print, but a new edition is in the works), The Gambit Guide to the English Opening: 1...e5 (Gambit 1999 - recently back in print), The Symmetrical English (Gambit 2000), The Nimzo-Indian: 4 e3 (Gambit 2002) and most recently Improve Your Positional Chess (Gambit 2004). My next book is a collaboration with John Donaldson, an update of his book A Strategic Opening Repertoire (ICE 1997), the new expanded and updated edition is a repertoire book for White based around a set-up where White uses the move order 1 Nf3, 2 c4, 3 Bg2, moves that fall well into what I will be covering in this column.

In addition, I have since 1999 penned the Checkpoint column on the popular ChessCafe.com website. In that column, I review new opening books, DVDs, DVD-ROMs, CD-ROMs, magazines and other things.

Of the openings we will discussing in this column, I tried most of them, while the English Opening and the Reti have been part of my repertoire for more than 20 years. Therefore any questions you may have or interesting ideas you have come across, please e-mail them with some thoughts of your own to me before you forget it, and I will pick those between those that are most interesting and relevant.