Quality Chess Blog

We have the winners of the Olympiad Quiz. And with winners, I do indeed mean winners. Read more…

I took the freedom of guessing on some of the final results of the Quiz. They may change, but at the moment, Gollum is in the lead with a projected 11 correct answers. It will take a bit of time to get confirmed which Iranians that made norms and other details. And some games are still in play, meaning that the final results may change!

The excel sheet is here.

Based on some of the discussions here on the blog recently and over time, I just wanted to briefly touch on a few subjects.

First off, just a little bit of an update. I uploaded two books to our printer Sunday night. They are: Read more…

If you want to follow how well things are going in the Olympiad Quiz, you can see how everyone have answered here.

You can enter the answers on your own and the sheet should calculate the points for all participants automatically. At least this is the theory!

We will find the winner when the tournament is over.

NB. Thank you to the 80% of participants that read the instructions and entered the competition correctly, without adding words that I then had to remove before I could enter them…

I get a few emails/facebook messages every week, asking questions, coming with suggestions and so on. In general, I prefer to receive them on the blog, so my answers can be seen by anyone who is interested, so they can work out for themselves which direction is right for them.

A few days ago I got the following email, which is quite typical, as is my answer, even though I went into extra detail this time around. With permission I post it here for anyone who are interested…

Dear sir,

My name is xxx xxx, aged 1x years and my elo is 21xx. I have bought a couple of books this month authored by you. I want to know which book should I start reading first. The books are:

Excelling at technical chess

Excelling at chess

Excelling at chess calculation

Attacking manuals 1 and 2

Inside the chess mind

Grandmaster versus amateur

Practical chess defense

Grandmaster preparation series-

Positional play

Strategic play

Calculation

Regards,

xxx xxx

xxx, India. Read more…

Yesterday we published three books, Dynamic Decision Making in Chess by Boris Gelfand, the second volume in his series. Grandmaster Repertoire 1B – The Queen’s Gambit, which is the second out of four books in Boris Avrukh’s reimagining of a 1.d4 repertoire. And finally Grandmaster Repertoire – 1.e4 vs. the Sicilian III by Parimarjan Negi, which is the fourth volume out of six. All three authors will continue their work on these projects and release more books next year.

Tomorrow the Baku Olympiad begins. We have created a small Quiz, where the winner will win a box of chess books, sent to anywhere in the World. Please go to this link to see the conditions for entering (which is mainly to structure the email according to the example!).

Andrew, John and Colin are all playing in the Olympiad for Scotland, while Nikos is the captain of the Danish team. Claire and I will stay at home. Orders will go out as usual, but single purchases might take 1-2 days longer before they go in the mail.

We will put another newsletter together after the Olympiad – with actual chess content!

Adding to this newsletter, I would like to say that once the Olympiad is over and everyone are back, we will be able to work out exactly where we are with various projects. I have a bit of news now, which is that the Ragozin and the final Kotronias book on the KID are basically done from the authors and will be big priorities. King’s Indian Warfare and Grandmaster Repertoire 19 – Beating Unusual Openings are both going to print this weekend and a few other books are nearing completion. I know at least of one author who is done and just rechecking stuff. But he is playing in Baku too, so probably we will get that book delivered once the guys are back.

Excerpts will be slow in coming. I am busy and Colin is in Baku. We still don’t have an official publication date for these two books. It will be close to radio silence from us for the next two weeks; except that I will pop in, do the Monday poll and a few other minor things.

Recently a book, written by Timoshenko on the Sveshnikov Sicilian, was published in Russia. From all we know, it is a decent book by a real expert on the opening. We do not want to publish it in English, as we have our own book by Kotronias, which is really excellent.

But Russian Chess House decided that this Timoshenko book would fit in well with their version of the Grandmaster Repertoire series, where they have previously published some of our QC books. To do this, they took a version of the cover we had given them for a different book, and then their cover artist lifted the chessboard photo off our book on the Sveshnikov Sicilian and used it on their own cover.

Their thinking was: this will cause no damage to Quality Chess and be good for Russian Chess House.

Our thinking is that:

a) They did not ask us, which is a big transgression. And we would have said no.

b) It does reflect on Quality Chess, as people will naturally tie this book to our brand. This is called ‘trading off’.

If we wanted to do it, we could license our brand in Russia and elsewhere, but it also means that some people will hold us responsible for the quality of the Timoshenko book and if it is not good, they will think worse of our books. This might not be a case with this book, we don’t know for sure to be honest, but clearly this is a choice we want to make!

Similarly, we believe in Russian Chess House’s series there is a book by Scherbakov on ‘The Triangle System’  that looks like a Quality Chess book, but is nothing to do with us.

We have talked to Russian Chess House and they are apologetic. Things have been sorted out.

We share this with you for a few reasons:

a) We want you to know that this book has nothing to do with us and will not be published by us.

b) Please think about the idea of a victimless crime. There is not really any such thing. Respect copyright, especially ours!

Last week’s poll question was: ‘Is 3 points for a win a good system for chess?’ The vote was strongly ‘no’, but with some support in comments for ‘yes, but only occasionally and at the elite level’.

This week’s poll will be a Quiz! Our quiz topic is the Baku Olympiad.

The prize is the same as always: ten Quality Chess books of your own choice and ten Quality Chess books of our choice (see our typical freebie list of books where we published too many copies compared to the audience; or undiscovered masterpieces, if you like). We will send it with FedEx or UPS to your home address.

Deadline: one hour before the start of play on September 2nd, 15.00 Baku time.

Quality Chess will be the final and only arbiter of what the correct answers are! In this event of a tie, the tiebreaker will be how close to correct you are on Question 3.

The entry HAS to follow the following layout (see example below). If they do not, we will ignore your entry. The layout is based on making it easy to copy and paste it into an excel sheet. Here are the requirements:

Send an email to OlympiadQuiz2016@qualitychess.co.uk. Write whatever you want in the topic line; we will ignore it anyway…

NICKNAME
Answer 1
Answer 2

And so on. Each on a new line. Just the answer: number or one word.

Full name and address where you would like the books sent to. Please make sure that this is a place where someone can sign for the parcel. Updated with bold and underlining. No address, no entry!

If your entry does not follow this setup, sorry, you will not participate this time around. I do not want to spend time restructuring your entry in a competition where I donate the prizes :-).

The Questions:

Read more…