Quality Chess Blog

I have been making the finishing touches on Attack & Defence and Endgame Play over the last two months. I know from experience that my opinions on the quality of the books are not going to be the same as the readership; for example, I like Positional Play most of the first three books, while the most popular is without a shadow of doubt Calculation. I think this is good news for the readers, as the two new books were always meant to be closer to Calculation than to the two positional ones. Sure, there are some exercises with a strategic/technical aspect, but a lot of the positions are very concrete and requires accurate calculation from the reader.

Most progressed is Attack & Defence. I think we are going to the printer in two weeks. At the moment I am finishing the last chapter, while John is polishing off Pump up your Rating. As John is hyper efficient and as the formatting of my book will be near perfect from my hand, editing should happen in a whirlwind.

We are looking at last week of August/early September for a joint publication of these two books. Axel’s is clearly the most original, but hopefully mine will do well as well, being a part of a series.

Looking further down the line, I saw on Facebook that Judit has finished rough draft for From GM to Top Ten. Marin still needs to have a look at it before it goes to us, so maybe this will not make it out in 2013, but only early 2014.

And after he has finished editing my book, John will continue on Playing 1.e4. Already a lot of work has been done on these books, but the masters hand is needed to finish them. Hopefully it will not take five years, but rather 5-6 weeks to finish the first volume.

Meanwhile Colin McNab has made great progress on Playing the French, written in Nikos’ voice, with my support. I am quite happy with this book and hope it will support our most important opening book of the autumn, Grandmaster Repertoire 14 – The French Defence 1 by Swedish GM Emanuel Berg. Andrew is a few weeks from the end of the editing of that one, so it seems likely we will have two books out on the French together in the second half of September.

This covers almost everything in the Coming Soon section so far. But I should also mention that Boris Avrukh, Victor Mikhalevski and Tiger Hillarp-Persson are all writing in between tournaments. As their last books for us were all masterpieces, we are very optimistic about their next projects.

Did you ever see the 60 Minutes clip on Carlsen; it’s maybe 8-10 minutes long. You can find it on Youtube if you did not catch it. Basically, as a chess player you are constantly amused. For example: when they are amazed by Carlsen’s confidence against Kasparov, when he does not feel that he has to sit at the board when Kasparov is deciding what line to go for on move 5. Or the expressions of wonder when the journalist sees Carlsen give a blindfold display. “The most amazing thing I have ever seen,” I think the words were.

But the real amazing thing is not the party tricks grandmasters can easily perform. The amazing thing is the story of “lazy Carlsen” and how the myth-machinery is spinning, with Friedel from ChessBase chipping in, using the L-word.

Carlsen did decide early on not to go down the Russian drillmaster school and decided to be in charge of his own chess development. He does not devote all of his time to chess when he is at home; maybe not a lot even. But here are some of the statements that contradict the lazy idea:

– When up in the London Eye with the journalist, Carlsen blanks him and blanks the view; he is thinking about the next day’s game.

– At some point he says that the trip he went on at age 13 was very successful and the culmination of a heavy amount of work.

– He is travelling half of the year, at least (I think they said 200 days) with chess.

– He is sweating it out in the gym.
And this is just from a less than 10-minute segment! We have far more information on Carlsen showing his high level of concentration at the board, that he has a strong team of trainers and helpers and so on.

I am sure that Carlsen likes to play on the Wii, that he spends a good deal of his time in Norway hanging out with friends and playing football. But you are not lazy because you do not spend all your time preparing for the next game. Kramnik, Gelfand and Anand are all married with children; knowing personally what that feels like, I can say that a lot of time is spent being a family man!

The term “the Mozart of chess” has been re-invented for Carlsen. The metaphor is supposed to be something like a “no-effort genius” I assume. Indeed, Mozart did study music with his father (a top composer in his own right) from the age of 2. He wrote his first big pieces at the age of 6 – in his father’s handwriting (and allegedly copy and pasted from little-known pieces). By his early twenties, he was the most talented composer of his time – OVERNIGHT!

Carlsen is the number-one rated chess player at the moment because of a few factors:
Read more…

It has been clear to us for some time that everything surrounding the King’s Gambit release has been jinxed. Latest, the KID and the Trompowsky have been two weeks delayed from Estonia due to DSV mucking about. They should arrive next week; once they have located them…

Meanwhile the King’s Gambit arrived this morning in our warehouse. It will be in a few shops and in our office next week and most places at the very end of that week/ start of the next. Hopefully this is the end of the jinx…

Obviously, as I pressed publish to this post, our Internet died. (Oh yeah; please no more requests for John’s blood. He read the comment and cut his finger three minutes later.)

Some people assert that the authors of chess repertoire books should not be allowed to play anything other than what they have recommended in their books. I have always found that this claim, if upgraded to law, would seriously injure the human rights of a small group of people I have a natural positive bias towards.

Why do chess authors play in tournaments? Basically to win games, rating and prizes – just like everyone else. They are not on a book tour!

Repertoire books are great and extremely useful. At times someone will say here on the blog that grandmasters don’t read the Grandmaster Repertoire books. Well, we know for sure that the Chinese don’t really read them, because they keep getting stuffed by recommendations from them! But we also know that Anand, Kramnik, Ponomariov, Aronian, Gelfand, Ivanchuk, Svidler, Grischuk, Adams, Polgar and most likely all the other top players in the world have them – with the exception of Shirov, who “doesn’t read chess books”.

However, none of these players would ever follow a repertoire strictly. Instead they look for ideas and information; new analysis and so on. They have their own core repertoires, but will at times include ideas from wherever they find them. In some cases they will take up a new opening and check the analysis carefully; adding their own ideas.

It is not a surprise to me that after the Avrukh and Delchev books were published on the Grünfeld this opening became wildly popular among top players.

There are times when players of a reasonable level will follow a repertoire book for a tournament. Recently GM Sune Berg Hansen followed Bologan’s book on the Chebanenko Slav at the Danish Championship and in general did OK out of the opening with it. I am sure it happens all the time.

But what about the authors?

I want to give two examples of authors following their repertoires from the same tournament:

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We are very proud to announce that the Danish Federation, on the suggestion of the three national trainers (of which I am one and obviously biased and most pushy) have officially recommended Artur Yusupov’s nine-volume training series to their members. This is not just a “favour to Jacob” – as it took some time to get them to do it. They have made special offers in their web shop, published a long review in the membership magazine and so on.

In September Artur will visit Copenhagen and Middelfart for training sessions with the elite and Danish “ambitious amateurs”.

Again and again on this blog I recommend the Yusupov books to those asking “what should I do to improve”. There are many ways to improve and this is only one. But it is tried and tested, well-structured and easy to use. Have a look here and download a chapter from each of the books for free…

Oh yes, after some struggle, I managed to talk Artur into a guest appearance on the blog for a Q & A session at the end of August.

One of my least proud moments as a chess player on the international circuit was in 1998 when I lost a game with absolutely no involvement from either player:

Sergei Tiviakov – Jacob Aagaard
Breda 1998

1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.d4 cxd4 4.Nxd4 Nf6 5.Nc3 e5 6.Ndb5 d6 7.Bg5 a6 8.Na3 b5 9.Nd5 Be7 10.Bxf6 Bxf6 11.c3 0–0 12.Nc2 Bg5 13.a4 bxa4 14.Rxa4 a5 15.Bb5
I knew Sergei was playing this off-beat move, but I had recently written a book on the Sveshnikov and not found anything wrong with the official defence.

15…Ne7 16.Ncb4 Be6 17.Nxe7+ Qxe7 18.Bc6 Rac8 19.Rxa5 Rxc6 20.Nxc6 Qb7
[fen size=”small”]5rk1/1q3ppp/2Npb3/R3p1b1/4P3/2P5/1P3PPP/3QK2R w K – 0 21[/fen]
My book said that this was the way to play with Black and that it should all end in perpetual check. I did have a little voice in the back of my head that asked why Sergei was entering this variation if this was the case. But in a moment of complete stupidity, I ignored it, thus wasting a chance to play a real game against a truly great player. Then the “novelty” came.

21.h4! Qxc6 22.hxg5 Qxe4+ 23.Kf1 f6 24.Ra4 Qb7 25.Qd3 Bf5 26.Qxf5 Qb5+ 27.Kg1 Qxa4 28.Qxh7+ Kf7 29.gxf6 Kxf6 30.Rh3 Ke6 31.Qxg7 Qd1+ 32.Kh2 Rxf2 33.Rh6+ Kd5 34.Qb7+
1–0

Luckily I got to play Sergei for real nine years later. Although I fell into a bad opening line again, this time I was only badly worse and managed to fight my way out of it. I was even winning somewhere towards the end, but at that point I relaxed, happy not to lose the game.

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Black to play

Kasparov no longer plays and, having passed 50, if he did play he would just be a has-been, at least if you listen to the words coming out of his own mouth. “Chess is becoming younger” is one of the claims he has made, in-between his disrespect for the Anand – Gelfand World Championship match last year and his suggestions that Anand should retire.

It all sounds very plausible when someone like the greatest player in history says this with the authority and conviction he usually produces. But ask yourself: would Kasparov be a top 10 fixture if he was still playing? Do you think he would be that much worse than Aronian, as an example, if he was still as determined to play chess as he used to be?

Insiders all know that Kasparov is “in love” with Magnus Carlsen and has wanted to see him as the World Champion for a long time. He started the talk of an Aronian – Carlsen match as the only legitimate thing; but personally I prefer the current situation where we have a shaky qualification system, when I think of the alternative of the late 1990s, where the World Champion offered a match for two players, and then gave the loser a World Championship match. Actually, the match that Kramnik won was first turned down by Anand, as far as I know.

Read more…

We are a little disappointed by our printer. How dare they put anyone else in front of us in the queue? Well, easily it appears. But with Kotronias on the King’s Indian – Fianchetto Systems uploaded and the King’s Gambit being uploaded today, everything is well and we dare project a publication date for seven books. This includes Playing the Trompowsky – An Attacking Repertoire, as well as the Mongoose title Best Play by Alexander Shashin and the paperback versions of Calculation, Positional Play and Strategic Play.

Things can still go wrong, get delayed and so on. But at least there is something to look forward to.