Quality Chess Blog

If you are like me, you often get “we don’t like to brag…” emails from our friends at New in Chess, where of course they revel in their recent achievements. I have nothing against this, only I am not sure how well it works with a sophisticated audience like the people who buy chess books. This is the main reason we are not doing something similar with out blog or newsletter.

Obviously we like the fact that people occasionally buy our books when they visit the blog, but we are actually more focused on the positive debates and ideas we get from it. Do not forget that the Grandmaster Preparation series (including the name!) is based on a suggestion here.

It is the same way with the books we produce. We try to focus on the product and then let sales work out for themselves. This is not because we do not like bestsellers; we like them a lot. They keep the lights on and allow us to take a salary (which in John’s and my case has only been for the last three of the soon ten years we have been going that this has been happening).

We did at some point try to make “commercial” books. Easy, quick and profitable. I think 2-3 books were aimed at this. We are talking 2005-8 maybe. No one really bought these books and we hated the process and the product. So we decided not to think like this anymore.

At times there are books where we think will only do limited sales, but they become runaway successes. I remember joking that PUMP UP YOUR RATING was the new version of Excelling at Chess. But I did not believe many would buy it (John did the final edit and was far more optimistic, based on quality). Actually it has already sold 500 copies more than we expected from 10 years sale. Still, when Axel came to me and said he had wanted to write this book for years, had worked towards it and only wanted to do it with us; I became both flattered and interested. So I personally worked over some chapters with him, to help him communicate his ideas better. Once he got the hang of it, he did not need my help anymore and wrote the rest of the book with great confidence and skill. He very deservedly won the ChessCafe 2013 Book of the Year award.

One day I will maybe give the general writing advice; if John will let me!

Oh yes; the title is all me. I know it is corny, but we were trying to get people to read this gem of a book.

Another big surprise was the success of Grandmaster Preparation – Calculation. This was based on an idea Dvoretsky told me about back in 2002; to sort the exercises by thinking method and not chess theme. It was just a way for me to use training material I had around and was supposed to be a slow, low burner. Rather surprisingly it looks like it will become my biggest seller for Quality Chess and won the ACP book of the Year award. We did not think this was the best book of the year, but who are we to argue with the public.

The book we loved most (of our own) is Judit Polgar’s How I Beat Fischer’s Record. Luckily the critiques have their high-brow award as well, where quality beat popularity. Judit won the ECF book of the Year award 2013, after missing out on the ACP award by only ONE vote. The book has not been as fully successful as we hoped, but then we were very optimistic.

Finally, we regained the lock on the ChessPublishing Opening Book of the Year vote with The King’s Gambit. This has very little promotional value; it translates to just about no sales. And this year it was an unpleasant experience altogether.

Still, it is nice to see that John’s five years of agonizing, procrastination and finally immense work effort is rewarded with not only good sales, but also praise from the opening theory fanatics. We are very grateful for the support and very proud winners. The book will be reprinted soon and the cover will show how proud we are.

Previous winners have been Marin (2009), Avrukh (2010, 2011), Sherbakov (Everyman, 2012).

So, we do not like to brag, but… Quality Chess has for the first time won the Grand Slam. The four awards all chess authors can compete for. The only one that got away from us this time around was FIDE’s Boleslavsky award (where only FIDE trainers are eligible): quite fittingly it went to Jeroen Bosch as a sort of lifetime award for the SOS series and various other writings. Congratulation to him, it is very well deserved!

It will be interesting to see how Pump will do in the other awards this year…

Yesterday I finished the last chapter for Endgame Play. As usual when finishing a book, I feel empty, ill and slightly beside myself. There is more work to do, of course, but the difficult (read: brain in active mode) part of the work is done.

I am considering updating my laptop. Any advice on a good one for chess purposes? Money is an issue (donations welcome), but I am really looking for a good one.

We have banned a person from commenting on our blog for the first time ever this week. Not only was he trolling John and myself, he was also becoming a nuisance for everyone else. We are hoping that we will not have to do this again for a long time; not the least because it is time consuming to have to block his repeated attempts to get around the block.

Some wrote on the blog that Quality Chess and especially I had done great service to chess. I understand where this comes from, but find it rather unfair to John. He has personally edited most of our top books: Learn from the Legends, GM1, How I Beat Fischer’s Record, Attacking Manual 1, Pump up your Rating, Tiger’s Modern and so on. Besides this, he just won the Chess Publishing book of the year for The King’s Gambit, despite a vicious campaign against him. John and I have always been 50-50, though I think he is putting in more work and creating more value than I.

Besides this, John is my boss! He has the final say on everything, as we believe someone has to have this power.

Andrew Greet has also contributed greatly over the years. His work with Tibor Karolyi’s books as well as Berg, Kotronias, Mikhalevski, Attacking Manual 2, various GM Repertoire books and so on, should not be underestimated.

Our other employees, Colin, Claire, Nikos and Danny have to be content with praise in private.

Next up for me is some pre-editing on the Grivas book, the Sveshnikov Sicilian and then maybe a chess tournament!?

This is what our current thinking is concerning out publishing schedule. It is a bit mundane; no big surprises. But there are some good books in there!

Elsewhere on the internet there has been some debate on what constitutes a novelty and what does not. Some people think that it is a move not played before; others think it is a new idea. Then there is the whole computer aspect of it. If a computer plays or mentions it; is it a novelty?

In Quality Chess we are trying to make useful books to those wanting to prepare for their games in the most effective manner possible. Most people will use a combination of books and databases, while some will only use databases. For this reason we have always gone by the “not in the database” definition.

We encourage our authors to indicate when a move is new. We always tell them to give sources where appropriate and to credit all ideas by other people to them. Therefore you will frequently find in our books a N and a comment saying that another person has analysed this in xxx publication.

We also tell our authors to write the truth. You will not find many examples of over-optimistic evaluation in QC books. Not only is it rather low to write in this way; making it unpleasant to go to work. We also think it is a poor business strategy.

Regarding novelties; I did not put up an article first, as I did not want to prejudice the view from people frequenting this blog. It could have been split in other ways, but this is what we could think off in the office and what others suggested. The result indicates a difference of opinion, but does not suggest that we are out of touch, so we will continue to do what makes sense to us and what keeps our books consistent.

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White to play – what is the best option?

I saw a game a few days ago that made me think about something that often happens to us: While we are calculating our main line, going deep, looking for nuances, we can get a sudden epiphany! But what about: “this!”

While this sometimes is a stroke of genius, there is no guarantee that this is the case. But the emotional impact can be rather big, skewing our judgement.

The example in question is the following:

Read more…

Are we in for a boring week on the blog? I could use one after the debates on whether to say that if I did what you did, I would not be able to look my friends in the eye indicates judgement – which for some reason I do not understand, it does not.

Anyway, I had a thought experiment. If you are not allowed to win by chance in a “Mate in 105” position, but have to offer a draw after you have blundered your queen and the opponent has blundered his back in return; what then if we skewed the odds further in my opponent’s favour? We actually make the position a technical draw. We take the moment before the trick and then try to claim a draw, because it would be wrong to win that way.

Furthermore, in order to make people feel ok about voting yes to upholding the arbiter’s decision, we all voted for it. I even did it twice. If the remaining 7 votes were taking the piss or serious, I do not know. But here is the result:

So, what is the situation? We have the right to play on and not to play for tricks and should even consider suing if denied. Because if we actually make a trick, then we should leave by the back door and never come back. Am I summing it up fairly? For some people, yes. Others probably think like I do: we have a set of rules and as long as we stick to them, we are doing just fine. Chess is an artform, a sport and a science. But not all three all the time.

This happened to one of my friends. Besides it being a funny story, it leads to a moral dilemma.

He was playing in the last round for the first place. He was better, though not winning, in the ending and the opponent was running out of time. At some moment the opponent claimed a draw. The arbiter asked him to play on. He refused claiming that his opponent “would try to trick him”. The arbiter saw his point and declared a draw. My friend appealed.

The quickly put together appeals committee included the arbiter and the travel companion of the opponent. It also included the hotel manager, who was seen as unbiased. With the votes 3-2, they decided to declare the game a draw. The opponent’s travel companion voted for a win for my friend; so no unfair bias there. The hotel manager voted for a draw. When asked if he played chess, he said, “yes.” My friend rephrased: “Do you know how the pieces move?” The answer was “most of them.”

Jokes aside: let’s vote on whether or not the committee made the right decision.

I just got these two as options from one of our cover artists. I would like to know what the public thinks. Please vote in the poll and come with further comments below.

Cover A is the brown one, Cover B is the red one.