Quality Chess Blog

Later this summer we shall publish a book by Swedish IM Axel Smith called Pump Up Your Rating. Axel is also writing a related blog called Pump Up Your Rating at the following link. That blog is not controlled by Quality Chess, so it will be up to Axel what he writes about, but I suspect chess improvement will be a recurring theme.

I have read the first draft of Axel’s book and I am delighted with how it is shaping up, but then I would say that, wouldn’t I?

We have for the last nine years been pressuring Tiger Hillarp-Persson to write another chess book after the hugely successful and in my opinion simply wonderful Tiger’s Modern. I just pushed again and he was squirming a bit, saying that he might get a round to it.

More importantly, he said that he is teaching a bit these days and that he has created a nice little website. So we thought, if we push that, maybe he will feel grateful and write another book for us. Is it too much to ask?

Dear Quality Chess Reader,

All modesty aside, we must announce another Quality Chess prize winner – in fact a 1-2. Jacob Aagaard won the Association of Chess Professionals’ 2013 Book of the Year prize for Grandmaster Preparation: Calculation. In second place, just one vote behind, was How I Beat Fischer’s Record by Judit Polgar. My personal congratulations to both authors.

This award means that Jacob is the chess author who has won the most prizes – ACP, ECF, Boleslavsky, ChessCafe and Guardian. It was close with Mark Dvoretsky and John Nunn before, but Jacob now has his nose in front.

In a supersized chess file (pdf or pgn) there are many games from the Danish Championship and Danish Blitz Championship, plus analysis that updates and adds to Grandmaster Repertoire 12: The Modern Benoni. The new Danish Champion is GM Davor Palo, but who is their new Blitz Champion? It was another prize for GM Jacob Aagaard.

Regards,

John Shaw

Chief Editor

Quality Chess

Calculation won the ACP book of the year prize with one vote ahead of How I Beat Fischer’s Record. Sort of random and a bit undeserved, as Judit’s book is far richer than mine. But obviously people care most about improvement, so a training book always has an advantage.

This is not said to be ungrateful. I am terribly chuffed and proud and want to thank everyone who voted for me. I only say that it is a shame John and I did not vote, as we would have voted for Judit!

At the same time congratulations to Ruslan Sherbakov, who won the Chess Publishing members vote for the best opening book of 2012. Previously this was won by Avrukh and Marin. We are big fans of Sherbakov and think he is a worthy successor. If I am a worthy successor to last year’s winners of the ACP award, Nunn and Dvoretsky, I am less sure.

Dear Quality Chess reader,

On Friday 15th March we published three new books.

Grandmaster Repertoire 12: The Modern Benoni by Marian Petrov provides a complete repertoire for Black after 1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 c5 3.d5 e6. The repertoire is sharp and ambitious but not overwhelming in the demands it places on Black’s memory.

Strategic Play is the third in Jacob’s Grandmaster Preparation series. The chess is challenging and instructive with plenty of exercises to stretch your understanding. On a shallower note, Strategic Play has my favourite cover of all the books we have published.

Soviet Middlegame Technique by Peter Romanovsky is the latest in our Classics series. It is a fresh translation of what were originally two books – one on planning and the other on combinations. I prefer others to write our sales text for us, so GM Kotov on Romanovsky: “One of the best books in the world’s chess literature.”

Sales news: on our site we have a new range of special offers. The webpage shows Read more…

It is very rare that we make advertisement for other chess products here – maybe we never did? But I just wanted to say that to those who have children interested in chess (like myself), there is a new app available for Ipad (and later on for Iphone, but not yet as far as I understand).

Here are a few screen shots from the presentation video:

Yesterday we had a surprising 15 minutes for christmas shopping, when the fire-alarm went off. Apparently the cafeteria for the call-centre that occupies the bottom three floors of our building had decided to heat up a christmas pudding in the microwave!

We were not upset. It is all about perspective. The previous building we were in had a fire-alarm going off almost weekly at the time we left. One time, towards the end, when we were crossing the street for the standard drink in the pub during “the fire” I noticed that 2 of the firemen ran into the building and then ran straight into the chip-shop…

We do our best to check our books for mistakes; even painstakenly so. In version 34 of the proofread version of Positional Play there were no big errors. In the print version (35) there was one. Sympathy is appreciated; abuse unnecessary, I feel bad enough already, even if this time it was not my fault!

Knowing how journalists rewrite us, the answers below are probably more or less what Nikos said

5 questions

To

Nikos Ntirlis (“Reporter”, 29/9/2012)

Famous…away from home

He has got an enquiring mind and that’s why from a little kid he studied a lot of things, like astronomy. He also got involved with sports and especially martial arts where he got 2 Black belts. Today, Chess is his primary pursuit. He has got the title of “FIDE Trainer”. We are talking about the 28 year old from Patras, Nikos Ntirlis, the coach of Danish National Team…

How did you start working on chess?

N.N: When I was 17 years old, a big age for someone that wants to become good at international level. My first teacher, Nikos Karapanos, said to me that someday I’d become a good player, but not a great one, but if I was determined enough and worked hard I’d become a great chess coach! My teacher sadly passed away in August 2009, at the age of 42. In his memory I wrote my first chess book that was published in English.

How come an English-speaking publication house got interested for your work?

N.N: In Greece, today especially due to the financial crisis, it is next to impossible to publish a chess book if you don’t posses in your own the money for it and you don’t have the necessary support. Abroad, those things don’t count. What really counts is the quality of your work. The best world-wide publication house dedicated on chess decided to publish a book with my name on it, in their most prestigious series, the Grandmaster Repertoire series, where only famous authors sign the books. At the beginning I couldn’t believe it (and still, sometimes it seems that everything is a dream), but the book got published, it sells relatively well, the reviews are good (it was even voted for the second best book of the year) and the publishers are pleased with it. I don’t need more than that to be happy.

How did the work for the Danish Federation happen?

N.N: As a trainer I work mainly today with students abroad. Some of them are very successful players in their countries and this is always a good referral for a trainer. In August 2011 the European Team Championships took place in Halkidiki and this is when I was first approached to work for the Danish Team. After the event they went pleased with our co-operation, so I got a proposal for working again for them in the Chess Olympiad at Istanbul this year, 27 August to 10 of September. The Chess Olympiad is the biggest and most important tournament in chess.

And how did the team perform?

N.N: Among 158 countries, we ended up 18nth which seems to be the second best placement of the Danish team in their history (they were 9nth at 1978 but before the Soviet Union and the Yugoslavia destruction produced so many new countries) and we left behind teams with great tradition in chess like Israel, India and also Greece who has done well in the last times.

What are you future plans?

N.N: I’d like more people to know about chess and especially young kids to get involved with it because chess offers so many tools to use them later in their lives.

I will get a few nice photos up from my retirement lecture and simul. It was a nice quiet event at my local chess club with a few friends. I won all the games, some of them against 2100′s. I had a nice finish against a team mate, that was more or less like this (sorry, a few pieces are fuzzy in my mind!):

1.Qe6 Rd7 2.Qxf7+ 1-0

I do know that 1.Ne6+ was stronger objectively, but I quite like it the way it came .