On September 30 we will publish the next two volumes in Boris Gelfand’s celebrated Decision Making series. They are Technical Decision Making in Chess and Decision Making in Major Piece Endings. Excerpts of both books are now available – there is the Technical excerpt and the Major Piece excerpt.
On the same date, we will also publish Negi’s 1.e4 vs Minor Defences and you can also see its excerpt.
Great, really looking forwards to these two books!
Any idea when we will get:
1) An update to the Publication Schedule showing more Fall releases
2) 2021 Quality Chess upcoming books PDF
Thanks
Great! what about A Matter of Technique?
Playing the Caro-Kann as in the 2020 catalog will not appear in this year?
@BraveSubject
Apparently it is more than just a matter of technique to finish it :-).
The reality is that Boris’s book became two – and I typed in every word and variation and checked everything endlessly in them. However, I have begun writing and I have notes for a 5 volume series (it will be one book only, so all the good stuff).
@Lucifer
It is borderline. I believe spring will be realistic.
@notyetagm
We will put more books in coming soon next week. The covers were not finalised.
We usually have the leaflet ready in January. I want to have it ready earlier this year.
@Jacob Aagaard
Hi Jacob
Got all 3 on preorder but can I ask a question about one of the games in the gelfand excerpt? Been looking at the gelfand svidler rook and pawn endgame but can’t track the rest of the game down. It just says ” Internet 2020″ but was that a private training game or one of the covid internet tourneys. If private would be interested to see how they got there as parallels to some of the the games in dvoretsky endgame manual. Thanks
Ps can’t bust your analysis sea lost but first impressions was that there should be holdable so be good to know where the point of no return was
Seems lost..
Apologies it was tomashevsky svidler but in the gelfand book
Sorry for all the wasted space I was searching for the wrong players so have tracked it down . ?
Seems that Svidler played Rc5-c1+ then to b1 behind the passed pawn as we are all trained to do but the much more passive Rb5 blocking in front of the pawn is better. Did you and Boris look at this. I’d have made the wrong decision just like Peter ☹️
We looked at the game, yes.
I am probably in a minority. I do not like this online thing that is happening at the moment. Short time control when the players are chatting while playing half the time and games are decided on the quality of the local internet connection.
So, I am describing them as “Internet” simply. People know which quality of games we are talking about when we do that…
@Jacob Aagaard
Its like comparing the abomination that is 20-20 to cricket!
@Jacob Aagaard
Hi, Jacob, actually I think it is not a bad thing. Here is the thing, with the help of silicon, top players are better and better today. Their play are too perfect or too complicated for patzer like us to learn. (I remember some famous coach/trainer or some book said that “Study classical chess, which means games played before two Ks; games played after two Ks were too complicated and not good for non-master’s to study” something like that). Therefore, short-time control from those internet games actually provides better material for us to study.
Being paid big money just to play blitz must be every player’s dream. At least they look relaxed and take it for some long holidays rather than the future of chess. Time will tell.
It would be nice imho to widen the player base for such internet events, not just the usual top12 but maybe more strong GM.
@Stephen Jiang
I disagree 100%. If you want to see blunders, you can watch anyone play. However, if you want high quality chess, you need to have the best players playing. I watched the banter blitz between So and Shankland yesterday. The turning point was when Shankland outplayed So completely in game 4 only to lose the queen to a one mover. To me it is entertainment of a low rather low quality.
@Jacob Aagaard
Didn’t Petrosian loose his queen to a one mover in the 1956 Candidates game against Bronstein….guess it can happen to the best, regardless of the time control…
You are not alone in that minority. I am so sick of the millions of internet blitz tournaments that have filled this calendar year. It’s impossible to care about any of them.
It was a knife in the heart to hear that the US Championship title was going to be degraded and demeaned by being turned into a 4-day Rapid event with rounds at 1, 2:15 and 3:30 each day. Why not turn it into a 1-day event with 11 blitz games so that we can have a US Championship once every two weeks?
I’m just going to leave it at that before I say something I’ll regret later.
The main problem ist the time control, not the internet.
Did for example anyone care about this Biel tournament, where they mixed up everything with rapid, blitz and “classic”? It was not interesting at all, just chaos.
Who really thinks that armageddon games are exciting? Not me.
I’m so sick and tired of all these “Grand chess tour” stuff with the same faces everywhere playing meaningless games.
Bring back the good old days of Linares
I completely agree. I would like to go even further back, to the times of zonal and interzonal tournaments and world championship matches without a fixed number of rounds. These banter blitz games have nothing to do with chess. I don;t deny it can be fun to watch, but don’t pretend it’s serious chess. By the way: can we also reintroduce adjournments? I’m missing those too!
@Michael
Of course blunders can happen at any time control, but surely you can’t deny that chances of a blunder are much higher the faster the time control?
I don’t mind these events. It is the constant pressure on events with classic time control that bothers me. For example, Banter blitz is happening now. Carlsen and his gang are openly pressing for a take-over of classical chess by rapid and other fast events and this is one of their flagship events. But of course they use the standard rating to justify it.
Carlsen says that in classical chess people can smooth over their weaknesses in a way they cannot do in rapid. This is ridiculous. The main weakness of many top players is their inability to think deeply. Nakamura, Giri, for example. Here rapid comes to the rescue. Or Dubov. Relies heavily on bluff and traps. Does not work well in classical, but great in rapid.
To me it is a circus. Entertaining enough if you remember that people are clowning.
The US championship had to go rapid as the city of St Louis will not allow more than six people in a room at the same time. By at least go double round then…
Most attempts at long form online events have been horrible; especially for the players.
Frankly, I wouldn’t want to play any event with long time control online. The tournament feeling is completely lost, you’re sitting in front of a computer with some 2D board – I couldn’t even take it too seriously. Apart it’s completely unclear how to avoid cheating when you don’t monitor players with dozens of webcams.
But the same applies to short time controls online too. It’s so boring to see players sitting in front of their computers.
Instead I’d like many more (live) tournaments like the candidates with long time controls, many games and so on. Also I think the World Championship Matches should be longer then just 12 games.
It bothers me a lot, that the last WCh matches has been decided in rapid games…
The books are now on Forward Chess. It is disappointing to see for the UK, where VAT on ebooks was abolished almost 5 months ago, Forward Chess continue to charge VAT at 20%. The guidance from HMRC (the relevant tax authority) is that where it is an electronic copy of a book in circulation, the vat rate should be 0%.
You’re a purist Jacob whereas sometimes we just want entertainment. If you didn’t find the Carlsen Nakamura final exciting you have a very different chess brain to mine. I can quite happily ignore all the Twitter banter between Carlsen and Giri etc but there is also some great informative stuff too. Having the players explain their ideas and plans in the post mortem is something non internet based tourneys lack and you get their raw analysis rather than their smoothed over version after putting it through an engine that you might get in New in chess. Even in banter blitz Magnus is especially good at explaining his plans and general impressions of the game for mere club players like myself. Personally I’m amazed by the quality of the rapid games of the top 10 and as a live experience it beats a classic time control hands down…the last few World Championships have been pretty dull drawfests unless accurate well played home prep based equality is your benchmark but each to their own. For me it’s been a breath of fresh air ?
I guess the point I was looking to make was regardless of, the time control or the strength of players when they get into time trouble the pressure mounts and blunders happen.
The Petrosian game was two and a half hours for 40 moves and Petrosian had completely out played Bronstein only to blunder a one mover in time trouble…
But would you say that game was of low quality because of the time pressure blunder?
@Paul H
To update my above comment, FC have updated to reflect reduced VAT rates on ebooks. They-as has been my universal experience in dealing with them from inception-were exceptionally helpful. More of a reason to buy from them if you are based in Europe and your country has recently reduced/scrapped VAT on ebooks, as a lot have.
Technical Decision Making in chess p 137
“To those who want to look deeper into defence, a good starting point could be to look at Karpov and Kasparov games….. Another path would be to get all your friends to buy this book and have them write letters about the need for us to do a book on defence as well…”
Well I’ve bought the book so quid pro quo…
Anyone else want to join the bandwagon?
@JB
Me too, this is just a great series! More volumes are very welcome 🙂
Going through “Technical Decision Making in Chess”, really excellent so far. For me it is the part 2 to the first book on Positional decison’s, the dynamic one was a bit above my head, and look it now and then only for interesting games, rather than direct learning.
@JB But Jacob already wrote an excellent exercise book „Practical Chess Defence“ – although it is simply very exciting to know Boris‘ approach on every chess (and some non-chess, like football or philosophy) subject. I was wondering about his training regime, that would be very interesting for both coaches and players: how much time to spend on solving, playing, analysis, building a repertoire, endgame positions etc.
I would also love a Deep Endgame Analysis of Minor piece combinations and unorthodox piece combinations (Like 3 minors verse queen, 2 minors and rook verse queen and minor, rook and minor verse 3 minor)