Quality Chess Blog

In this weeks vlog, the experienced Greek GM Stelios Halkias talks a bit about his favourite Quality Chess books and gives to our viewers practical advice on various aspects of chess. It is the kind of things that led Stelios to perform over 2700 elo in the latest Baku Olympiad. He then goes on to show us one of his favourite positions from this Olympiad and gives us a tactical puzzle to solve which the great Nigel Short failed to do when shown!

Grandmaster Jacob Aagaard is going to India to promote his Grandmaster Preparation series in March/April. His tour will give lectures and training seminars in Mumbai (26-27 March), Ahmadabad (28-29 March), New Delhi (30-31 March), Kolkata (2-3 April) and Chennai (4-5 April).

I have personally taken up a challenge after reading an interesting article. It is my goal to read 100 books this year. 50 novels and 50 non-fiction books. I used to be an avid reader, but lately I have been caught up in too many things and maybe watched a few too many TV-shows on Netflix. Every second novel must be what we call a “serious” novel. At least!

In that connection, I propose a reading challenge for those who wants to improve their chess, but have never really gotten around to it. The Yusupov challenge.

Artur Yusupov has written 10 volumes in his series of training material for those starting at 1200-1800, wanting to get to 2200+. They cover more or less everything and received the first ever Boleslavsky medal from FIDE, when they started handing them out. And not without competition. Kasparov was in second place and Dvoretsky in third.

Your goal should be to read one book per month. There are 25 chapters in each book, making it a total of 250 chapters. They take maybe 10-20 minutes to read, after which there are 12 exercises, which should take you 20-40 minutes to go through. Some of you might want to spend more time per chapter, but the point stands. You can do six of them a week and make it easily. In a year, you will have learned an immense amount about chess.

Which order you should read the books in

When we acquired the books, we originally only planned to publish one from each series. We all make mistakes. For this reason, the order which the books are intended to be read is not entirely obvious. The order is:

Build up Your Chess 1, Boost Your Chess 1, Chess Evolution 1 – the orange books (Fundamentals series)

Build up Your Chess 2, Boost Your Chess 2, Chess Evolution 2 – the blue books (Beyond the Basics series)

Build up Your Chess 3, Boost Your Chess 3, Chess Evolution 3 – the green books (Mastery series)

The newest book, Revision & Exam 1 should probably be read last.

So, the order to which I suggest you read the books is:

Spring – The Fundamentals series

March: Build up Your Chess 1

Boost Your Chess 1

Chess Evolution 1

Summer – Beyond the Basics series

Build up Your Chess 2

Boost Your Chess 2

Chess Evolution 2

Autumn – Mastery series

Build up Your Chess 3

Boost Your Chess 3

Chess Evolution 3

Winter – Revision time

Revision & Exam 1

If you are up for it, sign up below.

In this video Jacob shows some tragicomedies from the recent Women’s World Championship and Nikos challenges the readers to calculate deeply and solve an endgame position.

The pgn file can be downloaded here.

I have been back for a few days from my trip to Tehran, where the second round of the Women’s World Championship has just finished. I went as a coach for Sabina Foisor, who found herself with changed circumstances that are too personal and complex for us to mention here. Once there, she played really well, fought like a lioness and did what we had agreed in advance, which was to take a full swing at her 250-points higher rated opponent. After a good first game, where her opponent almost over-pressed, as we had suspected she might, Sabina had White in the second game and would go into the next round with a win. She played a great game up to a point, but had spent too much time and went in the wrong direction and got a bad position. At some point it was lost in one move, but she resisted and at a later point she could have entered a very fragile, but possible drawing, zone. She did not and eventually went down.

Some people have been eager to criticize from far away the arrangement of the tournament. Read more…

The answer to the above questions is surely books and DVDs. However, with this huge wealth of material out there, it is easy to be completely confused. It is difficult to pinpoint on only one book, because different people at different levels have different requirements. However, I would like to tell you the story that happened with me yesterday:

Read more…