Quality Chess Blog

A few points about the sliding schedule. And this is really to the authors. 3-400 pages does not mean when exported from ChessBase! It means once we have diagrams put in and formatted the text!!!

Yeah, we are working through a number of tough ones. But they will be worth the wait. First the list, then a few comments below.

One obvious questions is: Whatever happened to Grivas’ THE GRANDMASTER PROGRAM. We were working on the book and we felt it had certain issues that we wanted to address in one way and Efstratious wanted to address in an entirely different way. We found it hard to find a compromise and decided that the best solution for all parties was for Stratos to publish his book with another publisher. I am personally disappointed about the way things went; it is quite an interesting and enjoyable book and I am sure it will do very well for another publisher. But Quality Chess has certain internal ways of doing things that might be a bit rigid, but have served us well. I am sure the book will come out on another publisher – I see no reason why it should not – and you will be able to enjoy it like I have.

To Book Shops Our lists are very much guess work and just keeping in touch with our readers. We put a date on the list when we think a date is prudent only. Otherwise we are guessing. Books over the empty lines are being edited. Books under have not yet been delivered – with the exception of ever-reliable Tibor Karolyi, of course. The official release date of The Secret Life of Bad Bishops will be the 30th July or the 6th August. But I hope we will have a presentation of the finished book at Politiken Cup on Monday the 28th July by Esben and it will be on pre-sale there of course! Quality Chess are proud to once again to sponsor this open, which is one of the top tournaments in Europe in respect to pleasure to participate in.

About order This is close to what I believe will happen. Of course there will be a few additional titles popping up along the way, but essentially, this is the order we currently believe things will happen. Up close this is definitely the case. Two months down the road – who knows.

I will put up a publishing schedule in a moment, but I just wanted to address the slide of THINKING INSIDE THE BOX. Basically, I am a bit worn out after doing ENDGAME PLAY, which as I have already attested, I will have spent about 1000 hours on preparing. This includes: finding positions, analyse them, use them with students, have two seminars in Denmark with the elite, write the text, rewrite the text, find new exercises after Karsten Mueller busted about 15 of them, rewrite changes from Karsten (big thanks once again), typeset the book, proof read the book, make more changes because I was worn out and made too many mistakes…

Am I whining? Yeah, a bit (read a lot). But I am knackered. I want to take it easy for a while and do some easy things.

So, I will go back to BOX somewhere after the Olympiad (should there be one). I have the ideas and I am eager to make it my best work. Which is also pressure and less easy than it once was (kinda still very happy with Positional Play!).

So I am helping two friends write their books at the moment. It is less difficult, as they have the last say and their names are going on the cover. And then I am looking after my students.

I might also help John a little with the second Playing 1.e4 book, as he is finding it tough to both write and be the Managing Director.

So it has been moved to 2015. Sorry to the 3-4 people looking forward to it. And to the rest of you, you will not be disappointed by what I am doing instead. Probably those 3-4 people will more than forgive me. We have a treat coming in the autumn…

Things are moving far better with the Forward Chess app (finally!). New books are being added all the time. In NIC 4/2014 we will carry a full page add for the app on page 3. Sales are slowly picking up, making it feasible to do the conversions (though this was not the reason for the delays, they were technical) and we start to look at it a bit more optimistically.

Also, there is a decent review on ChessCafe of the app. I should note that we have a free book on it as well and will continue to put a few free books on it over the years.

In last week’s post I talked a bit about the four types of decisions we need to make during the game. (Yes, I am aware that you can define it in other ways; this is just a way I find useful to do it when helping strong players navigate the complexities of the game). Please revisit if you have not read it yet.

Ashish kindly put up a link to a blog post by American Master and Mathematician Dana McKenzie. In this Dana talks about two types of players; those that approach chess with calculation and those that approach it with more general considerations, such as bad bishop, improving the worst piece and so on.

I know this is the reality for a lot of people playing chess; even very strong ones. One guy I worked with at some point (rated about 2625) was tactically exceptionally inclined, but like a computer, he could only make decisions with brute force. Unfortunately, unlike with computers, he was not able to calculate 2 million moves a second, so he had sort of hit a ceiling.

Although exceptionally intelligent, he had not worked out how to deal with the more positional aspects of the game. He had never had a trainer and although he had worked with some of the best players in the world as a second or as training partner, he was still missing basic skills.

Because this is what Dana McKenzie is talking about. Let us compare with football (soccer for our US friends). Obviously we have a natural way to kick the ball that we all do intuitively. If we play regularly we will pick up a few tricks and improve our skills, but we might still have a “lame left foot” and struggle to head the ball (closing your eyes while doing it as I used to do).

With this player we called calculation the hammer. This comes from the old saying, for the man with a hammer, every problem is a nail.

As this guy was much smarter than I, it was very quick and pain free to teach him to make simple moves based on positional considerations. I put him through the program I had in POSITIONAL PLAY and quickly he had it all covered.

Obviously he is still a great calculator; but now he calculates when there are things to calculate, not in all situations. He has more tools in his tool box.

My oldest daughter won the u300 (yup Scottish rating) event in Airdrie yesterday. She scored 7/8. Obviously the level is not that high, but for a six-year-old, it can still be intimidating. Actually, we had mentally prepared for her losing all her games, as she did in an event in Edinburgh in March.

This is from the last round where she with Black has blundered her queen (exchanges are rare on this level), but has received quite a lot in return. This is the moment where I came to watch:

Sarah – Cathy

[fen size=”small”]4k2r/r2nppbp/3p2p1/2pp3P/8/BP6/2PPPP2/3QK2n b k – 0 1[/fen]

Can you spot a deadly plan. Remember – your opponent will do NOTHING to stop it!

1… Rg8 2. Bxc5 Bb2 3. Bxa7 gxh5 4. Bb8 Rg1#

The first two moves looked very odd to me; then I realised what she was doing…

I am starting to feel back to normal. In the last few weeks of finishing Endgame Play, I was up to 80 hour work weeks (excluding taking care of a family). One Saturday night I went to bed at 2pm only to continue the work at 6.30 am the next morning.

Not fun, but I wanted the book finished.

I just want to put up this post to say thank you to the many people who have bought the book. I really hope it will live up to your expectations. I gave it all I could and so did the team (Danny, John, Colin, Andrew and Karsten Mueller). Personally we are happy with the result.

And yes, I would like to hear your opinion, positive or not. When you spend about 1000 hours writing a book (more than any other book I have done by far), you really would like to know what people think of it.

I will put a publishing schedule up within the next 48 hours, whenever I have a free moment.

(Taken from New in Chess Magazine 3/2014)

5. In our previous issue, Levon Aronian said that he didn’t understand what people mean when they speak of good form. Did you feel you were in good form?

I didn’t have that feeling at the tournament – where I was really shining was at the training sessions with Sergey Karjakin that ended a week before Yerevan. I cracked studies like nuts. Usually I take one of Jacob Aagaard’s books to tournaments and solve positions from them to find out what form I’m in. I remember that at the last Super Final of the Russian Championship in Novgorod I was really concerned about the results of my attempts, but it was already too late to do anything about it. But I don’t think I even opened Aagaard’s Calculation in Yerevan, apparently subconsciously feeling that everything was fine.

I am writing on an article to New in Chess at the moment and I came to think of an old argument I had with a friend about definitions. Basically he was of the opinion that good chess consists of opening preparation, intuition and calculation – and nothing else. I have a different view, cutting things up to minor sections. One of the differences came across when we debated a complex position. He said that it was solved with calculation, while I insisted that it was solved with strategic thinking. He did not see a difference.

Sometimes you have to accept that you do not speak the same languages. He had a lot of good points that were interesting, but here I think that we had a different approach. Unfortunately the debate turned sour and never became fruitful.

In STRATEGIC PLAY I wrote about one of my better ideas: to divide chess decisions into four categories. (Obviously they can be put into more or less categories; it all depends on how you choose to see the game. As far as I am concerned, anything that anyone finds useful is worth investigating.)

These categories are (free from memory – what I actually call them is less important, it is the ideas that matter):

a) Automatic Decisions

Moves that can be made without really thinking about it. Either because it is theory, or because there are no alternatives (legal or sensible).

b) Simple Decisions

Positions that can be solved without calculation (not variations necessarily – read the NIC article when it comes!). I have a training system for this in POSITIONAL PLAY, based on the three questions. It is a very powerful training system and if both 2600-players and my six year old daughter find it useful, it might help you as well.

c) Critical Moments

Positions where the difference between the best move (or two best moves, it is not an exact science, but a way for us to understand how we should relate to the position) is big. Let us say a pawn or +1.00 as the young people would call it.

d) Complex Positions

These are difficult positions that can only be solved with an interaction of positional thinking (b) and calculation (c). These come around only a few times in a game, if at all. They will at times have solutions where a positional aim is solved with counter-intuitive or anti-positional sequences. I deal with this type of positions in STRATEGIC PLAY and ATTACK&DEFENCE.

I find this way of carving the various decisions up useful during the game, in order to work out where to invest my time. Maybe I will write a book about this one day…