Quality Chess Blog

Quality Chess is pleased to host a fourteen-hour training seminar over four days with probably the most renowned theoretician in the world. GM Boris Avrukh has worked with Gelfand, Kramnik and Caruana and is currently the trainer of the Israeli national team.

The sessions will be divided into two themes: the opening and the middlegame.
Thursday the 5th 19-22: Preparation at Grandmaster level
Friday the 6th 19-22: Developments in Avrukh’s 1.d4 repertoire
Saturday the 7th 14-18: Prophylactic Play
Sunday the 8th 12-16: Aggressive Play

Venue: Quality Chess office, Central Chambers, 93 Hope Street, Suite 45 (Mezzanine floor). Entrance next to Caffe Nero, opposite Glasgow Central Station.

Price: £120 for all four days. 50% discount for juniors and those living outside Scotland who travel here to attend. £60 for a single day attendance. If we have more than 20 full paying customers (or equivalent income) every participant will get a free copy of a Quality Chess book. Every participant will receive a 25% discount on QC books bought during the lectures.

Payment method: To reserve your place, please send a cheque made out to Jacob Aagaard to 20 Balvie Road, Glasgow, G62 7TA, UK. Please also confirm via e-mail to jacob@qualitychess.co.uk.

Born in 1978 in Kazakhstan, Boris started playing chess at the age of 6. His first big win was the Soviet u-12 Championship (beating among others Sergey Movsesian). Later the same year he won the u-12 World Championship. In 1991 he won silver in the u-14 European Championship. In 1995 his family moved to the famous chess city of Beer-Sheva in Israel, where Boris received a lot of support from the director of the Beer-Sheva Chess Club, Ilyau Levant. From 1995-2000 Boris worked with Grandmasters Mark Tseitlin and Alexander Huzman (Gelfand’s coach for many years). The work bore fruit and in 1998 he became a grandmaster.

Boris’s debut as a chess writer was Grandmaster Repertoire 1 – 1.d4 Volume One in 2008 and he was immediately hailed as one of the world’s top chess theorists. The book’s impact on top level and amateur chess has been exceptional and also brought great success to Quality Chess. In 2010 Boris repeated this success with the second part of his repertoire: Grandmaster Repertoire 2 – 1.d4 Volume Two. In June his new book, Grandmaster Repertoire 8 – The Grunfeld Defence will be published. All of these books are published by Quality Chess.
From 1998 to 2009 Boris played for the Israeli national team. His success as an author, and subsequent training and lecturing jobs, meant that he was not selected for the 2010 Olympiad due to the principle that only full-time players should be in the team, although he was clearly strong enough. The national coach decided Boris’s abilities were better used as a second and he now works for the Israeli national team in that capacity.

We are estimating that Grandmaster Repertoire 8 – The Grunfeld Defence by Boris Avrukh will be available at the 3rd of June. Those who are eager to take up the Grunfeld before then, are recommended to look out for Delchev’s book for Chess Stars, which should be available in 2-3 weeks. We expect to have Vassilios Kotronias beautiful middlegame book The Grandmaster Battle Manual ready for the 3rd as well.

As something new, we will try to get the excerpts to you a bit early, even though they will not have a reliable contents page at this early stage.

On top of this we have made an agreement with Boris that he will work on a GM Repertoire book on 1.d4 deviations. This means a repertoire for Black after 1.d4 not followed by c2-c4 – be it for Grunfeld/KID players, Nimzo or Queen’s Gambit players. We hope to be able to include this book in our production for the end of the year, or early 2012.

Now I am off to send off the contract.

With all 440 pages uploaded, we have managed to get a publication date from the printer confirmed, as well as to speculate about the upcoming publication dates. The following titles might not be all the titles we will publish in 2011, but we hope to publish them all in 2011. If that makes any sense.

Sending a book of to the printer happens on a Friday night one time in three. Outside it is getting dark and dangerous, while we proofread the 440 pages a final time – undoubtedly missing something important. At the end of all books, we hate them. Or rather, we just want to go home…

It seems the book will be out on the 12th April in some countries, and a few days later in others. We will start sending websales on the 11th.

In these times where Saif Gaddafi claims to have paid for half of Sarkozy’s election campaign, where the Danish Minister of Defence says she had not considered that, when asked what would happen if Lybia would retaliate against Danish ships in the Mediterranean once in war, also Quality Chess has suffered hostility against our brand. This afternoon, we found the following evil note on our door:

We are outraged! We assure our readers that this is absolutely untrue! Our draughts are at least decent…

John says I have to go back to Experts on the Anti-Sicilian now . Seems it should be available to ship to shops on the 8th together with Chess Lessons…

All four editors at Quality Chess were playing this weekend.

Andrew Greet scored 2/2 in the 4NCL and John Shaw likewise in the Danish League. Jacob scored 1.5/2 and Colin mumbled his result and did not answer when asked a second time.

The 4NCL can be found at www.4NCL and the Danish League at http://www.divisionsskak.dk/holdarkiv/div1011/vis_rakke_tabel.asp?find=LIGA

Jacob’s win over IM Karsten Rasmussen bears good news for followers of the Tarrasch Defence:

1. Nf3 d5 2. d4 c5 3. c4 e6 4. e3 Nf6 5. Nc3 a6 6. cxd5 exd5 7. Be2 Nc6 8. O-O
Bd6 9. dxc5 Bxc5 10. b3 O-O 11. Bb2 Re8 12. Rc1 Ba7 13. Qd3 Bg4 14. Rfd1 Qe7
15. Na4? Ne4

Also winning was: 15… Nb4 16. Qb1 Bxe3!

16. a3 Nxf2 17.Kxf2 Bxe3+ 18. Kf1 Bxf3 19. Bxf3 Qh4 20. Rc2 Qxh2 21. Ke2 Bd4+

0-1

Quality Chess has joined the arms race and purchased a super computer, kindly assembled by Phil Harris. Our new machine is running at many times the speed of our quad core standard machines and needs a water cooling system to not overheat. Hopefully this will increase the level of our analysis for the future.

I wanted to show you a photo of how the water cooling looks inside, but it was quite low quality and I can’t be bothered to open it again. Sorry.

Update: Photo of the innards of the fancy new computer:

last night at the gym I caused a bit of a stir. I returned to my locker and found that once I unlocked it, there was nothing inside. I call the manager and he started checking all the locks to see if anyone by chance had the same code. 10 minutes later we were back where we started. I asked, what do you usually do in this situation? Check everything before we believe the worst, he replied. As for example checking the empty… Oops, is that your stuff? So, I had locked the empty locker next to my stuff. And it was all there, passport, money, blackberry, cards, secret novelties in the Sicilian, dirty books where the king is stripped bare. Surely you were mortified, a friend asked later. No, not at all. I burst out laughing. We always say, one day we will laugh at this. I always try to make sure that this one day is today…

A few months ago a guy wrote to me asking if we were going to include 6.Bg5 Nbd7 7.f4 Qc7 8.Qf3 h6 9.Bh4 g5!? in GM6. We had no intention to do so, but a last moment change of hearts has meant that we do indeed include this topical line. Berg, Dominguez, Navara and Ivanchuk has all been happy to try it out (not all have been allowed), but it is mainly Bogner that has shown the way in practice. However, if the ‘inventor’ of this line sees this post, he is very welcome to e-mail me again, as I can’t find his last e-mail!

Dear Quality Chess Reader, 

Recently we have experimented by printing some of our books in hardback. It was a success both in the favourable feedback we received on our blog and in terms of the sales. In fact, the hardbacks disappeared so quickly that we at Quality Chess did not even get to keep a personal copy. For this and other reasons we are reprinting more hardback versions of Soviet Chess Strategy and GM Repertoire 7: The Caro-Kann. We hope they will be available in 3-4 weeks.   

GM Boris Alterman was on John Watson’s ICC Radio show Chess Talk. Boris talked about about his book The Alterman Gambit Guide – White Gambits which John Watson spoke about very favourably. A few quotes (from Jacob’s memory): "A great section on the Panov… Designed with the average player in mind. Can also be used by club players and other more experienced players… A very well produced book, typical of Quality Chess."  

The Quality Chess Puzzle Book and GM Repertoire 6 – The Sicilian Defence will both be out in early July. Some of our readers generously contributed to the puzzle book by sending in their best chess moments, which we used to create a chapter called Contributions from our Readers 

Regards, Quality Chess

www.qualitychess.co.uk

www.qualitychess.co.uk/blog

Publication Schedule (with predicted page numbers)

Lubomir Ftacnik    Grandmaster Repertoire 6 – The Sicilian Defence   July   356

John Shaw   Quality Chess Puzzle Book    July    256

Christian Bauer     Play the Scandinavian     July/August    320

Artur Yusupov    Boost your Chess 2    July/August    288

Mihail Marin    Grandmaster Repertoire 4 – The English Opening vol. 2    August   480 

Mihail Marin    Grandmaster Repertoire 5 – The English Opening vol. 3    August   320

Tibor Karolyi    Karpov’s Strategic Wins: Volume 1 – 1961-1985    September    360

Tibor Karolyi     Karpov’s Strategic Wins: Volume 2 – 1986-2009 September    360

John Shaw     The King’s Gambit      September/October    256