Colin is off today, but sometime over the next few days we will put a few more books in the Coming Soon section. These are the books that are “all under control” (if ever that was true…) and where we know more or less when they will come out.
Many books are close to completion, but we do not know if printing will take three or five weeks, so there is a bit of uncertainty.
There is a special point about Dynamic Decision Making in Chess. Boris will be giving a 90 minute lecture at X-Tra Con Open (formerly Politiken Cup) in Helsingor on the 28th of July, assisted by yours truly. The entry fee is essentially to buy the new book in hardback. This is one month ahead of general publication.
1. e4 vs the Sicilian III is waiting for a few updates from Negi and a proofread. Playing 1.e4 – Caro-Kann, 1…e5 & Minor Lines is 90% proofread and will go to the printer this week. GM Repertoire 1B, 1.d4 – The Queen’s Gambit is halfway through editing and will be done within a few weeks. Key Concepts of Gambit Play is lacking a quick edit. Mikhail Tal 3 – The Invincible is lacking a long and thorough edit! The same with King’s Indian Warfare. The authors of Grandmaster Repertoire – The Nimzo-Indian and Kotronias on the King’s Indian 5 have sent many files already. Hopefully they are not far off. Thinking Inside the Box has yet to be fully written.
I have been busy with the Gelfand book and also wanted to spend a bit of time writing a beginner’s book, which is Chess from Scratch. I teach at Fettes College in Edinburgh and wanted to put my experiences of working with beginners on paper. As I am not going to the Olympiad this year, Read more…
I was asked this question (rephrased) on Facebook a few days ago. I felt that the right place to offer my opinion would be here. It will be an answer with a few points.
a) First of all, the answer is probably both yes and no. John and I are nothing special. I had “talent” for about 2200 and John maybe 1800. What I mean by this is that we got to these levels after playing chess for quite a number of years, but essentially just by playing. We did not study much before we hit the ceiling. This comes at different levels. For Luke McShane it came at 2600, while others face it at 1200 or 2100.
b) If you face the ceiling at 1200, I am honestly not so optimistic about you getting the GM title. I like to play music and I spend a lot of my time trying to improve, but I am not under the illusion that I will ever reach a professional level. This does not mean that it does not have tremendous value for me, it does. I love it.
c) The main issue with my musical ability is not that I do not have the talent of Prince or the educational possibilities of Mozart (home schooled by one of the greatest musicians of the time, his father). The real problem is more to do with the ‘10,000 hours rule’, as outlined by Malcolm Gladwell. (I know this is highly controversial, but let’s at least for the moment say that the idea of 10,000 hours of deliberate practice is a good indicator of how difficult it is to learn something). I do not have five years of 2,000 hours to invest. I maybe practice 3-4 hours a week on average, 10+ hours on a good week and only 1 hour of fooling around the last few weeks. Progress is understandably slow.
The question of talent
We have debated this from time to time here on the blog. It seems clear that talent exists and Read more…
We have long been pushing our hardback editions as much as we can without seeming, well, pushy. This has been for one reason mainly; we believe in the product immensely and the feedback we are getting is that people are very pleased with it. They lie open flat, for example, which is an important issue when you are working with books such as the Yusupov series or my own Grandmaster Preparation books.
We have always been happy with the quality of the paperback books and over the years we have received very few complaints about pages falling out of the books. This is if we exclude the first edition of Experts vs. the Sicilian and a reprint of Grandmaster Repertoire 3, where some copies were bound poorly. We took steps to deal with it at the time. Read more…
Boris and I are getting close to finishing the second book. Maybe 4-5 games more. We have already done quite a bit of stuff for the third book as well. Maybe we will march on and finish it quickly!? Anyway, the second book will be out at the end of August.
Boris is a very giving person, as you can see from his interviews with our friend Sagar Shah for ChessBase India, here and here. A lot of the time, our recordings are full of stories that are not suitable for publication. We entertain each other, basically. Those of Boris’s stories that I can pass on will make it into the book. So here is one of mine:
A few years ago I had an Indian grandmaster visiting for training in Scotland. After a few days of Scottish summer weather he asked me: Tell me Jacob, is this the monsoon?
An adult has a resting heart rate between 60 and 80 usually. This is the normal range. If you are unfit, your heart rate is often higher. If you are very physically active, you get a lower rate. Below 57 is called “athlete” in some graphics I have seen, which I think is too optimistic. Let’s call it physically active.
Anyway, moving house is supposed to be stressful, up there with divorce and death in the family. I recently had the easiest house move in history. I moved from a flat to a town house in the same building. Actually, when I moved in, the van was parked further away from the flat than the house is. On top of this I had good time, 10 days to do it in, and full understanding from my employer. I had friends that helped carrying stuff across and my mother came to visit, helping packing everything down and most of the stuff out again.
It was very stress-free, compared to other house moves I have been involved in. Still, there is a markedly change in my resting heart rate over the period, peaking on the last day of moving house. As I wear a Fitbit Surge, I have been able to track it clearly. It was something of an eye-opener.
Only today I am getting back to exercise, so the reason for the heart rate not getting below 60 again is easy to explain. But the leap was rather excessive. Yes, the last 66 was the last day of moving…
The Candidates ends today and with a very thrilling end indeed. It is 2013 all over again. Back then both Carlsen and Kramnik lost their last round game, after which Carlsen became the Candidate because of more losses (or wins if you insist).
Today we have a number of outcomes possible:
Karjakin or Caruana wins the game and qualifies.
The game is a draw and Anand does not win his game and Karjakin qualifies because of most losses.
The game is a draw and Anand wins his game, after which Caruana qualifies in the three way tie because of his win against Anand!
Some people (Greg Shahade for example) has come with ideas about a better Championship cycle. I am not against this at all, but I want to defend FIDE and say that we have a fantastic cycle as it is.
The World Cup is a really interesting event to follow. Very dramatic. The players qualified from it have not done poorly, historically. Gelfand won and Sergey Karjakin might win today.
The Grand Prix is great too. It involves players from top 25-30 that do not usually get invited to top events. The winner, Caruana, might win today as well.
To top up by rating might be the more dubious solution. Topalov has been a disaster twice, but then last time he qualified by winning the Grand Prix.
The Candidates is very exciting and all the players were conceivable winners in advance. They had 14 games to work out who was best, more than the World Championship match!
The fact that a lot of players are very close in strength (confirmed by rating as well) is a blessing. We have no Djokovic or Germany dominating.
At the end the Candidate has gone through a fantastic cycle to play the World Champion and will have deserved it fully.
Should the World Champion enter earlier. Tradition says no. I think he should be forced to play the World Cup, which would increase in value. And I would like more spots in the Candidates to go to people who qualify. But all in all, this is the best system we have ever had.
In case you did not see it. In a rook ending yesterday, Nakamura touched the king and seemed to act as if it was correcting the piece. In the video you can see the change of posture. I do not want to criticise him; it is hard to deal with your dream dying in a millisecond and these guys are under a lot of pressure. It took him 2-3 seconds to recompose himself and play on, just as Aronian jumped in very quickly calling it touched move. Aronian had no bad words about his opponent after the game, which says a lot. Our brain works in loops of 3 seconds, where we deal with the inputs just recieved; Nakamura did not get to the end of such a loop before he instinctively wished he had just corrected the piece. With my experience it shows nothing about his moral fibre at all.
Read more…
I am feeling a bit guilty that I have been poor at updating the publishing schedule – and that the last one did not have any dates on it. At this point it looks like Kotronias on the King’s Indian 4 – Classical Systems will be out on the 13th of April. Things can always go wrong with the printing process of course, but let’s presume they don’t. So less than a month away. An excerpt is now available.
But what I really wanted to talk about is this beauty:
Read more…
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