  We show how a careful analysis of the behaviour of a parton shower Monte
Carlo in the vicinity of the soft and collinear regions allows one to formulate
a modified MC@NLO-matching prescription that reduces the number of
negative-weight events with respect to that stemming from the standard MC@NLO
procedure. As a first practical application of such a prescription, that we dub
MC@NLO-$\Delta$, we have implemented it in the MadGraph5_aMC@NLO framework, by
employing the Pythia8 Monte Carlo. We present selected MC@NLO-$\Delta$ results
at the 13 TeV LHC, and compare them with MC@NLO ones. We find that the former
predictions are consistent with the latter ones within the typical matching
systematics, and that the reduction of negative-weight events is significant.
