Quality Chess Blog

I am just about to go out the door to something as rare in my life as three days of holiday. I will obviously be online and workning while away, but still…

Quality Chess has joined forces with Anuk.doo (mainly Arkadij Naiditsch) to produce the periodical Chess Evolution. The first issue, September 2011, will be available in a week or so and is now available in our webshop. Soon we will also have subscription options. Hopefully I will be able to set them up while I am away, but if not, I will set them up at the end of next week.

We also have our own Chess Evolution series, and volume 1 will be finished from the printer at the end of next week. The same is the case for Black Gambits 1. Both books will be shipping from the 30th of September it looks like. We will send CE Sep a bit earlier to webshop customers, but probably not to shops. However, it will be in your local shop at the beginning of October. And if it is not – ask them to order it!

I finally got around to updating the coming soon section and adding seven books. We will add text to them throughout the day.

Because of the slow progress on, and the extensive material for, THE ALTERMAN GAMBIT GUIDE – BLACK GAMBITS, we have decided to publish the book in two volumes. We just don’t want the readers to wait around for the second volume for another nine months, while the book is finished. So, we will publish it in two, slimmer and cheaper, volumes. The first will be available quite soon.

Obviously this has happened before with us – leading one planned 128 page book from Mihail Marin to be split twice, after one chapter turned out to be 480 pages in book form (GM3) and other 150 (half of GM4). Recently this also happened with the Grunfeld books by Avrukh, which were simply too thick as one volume, and are quite comprehensive as two.

We don’t want this to be a bad habit, but certainly it has happened a few times…

As some of you will have noticed – our website has been somewhat broken – making it impossible to buy stuff. Not a great business model. Blame the webmaster and play ignorant is my tactic :-).

On the 30th we will move office from the current location just opposite Glasgow Central to five blocks up the road. The area is nicer, the place is bigger, the building nicer, the price lower and the company owning it gone into administration; causing all sorts of logistical problems!

Obviously we are going nuts – but everything should be on track now. Hope so – I just spent 1000 pounds in IKEA for new office furniture, including a big corner desk for yours truly.

John is working away on the King’s Gambit book. We are now optimistically putting a date on publication, although our confidence in it is low. Too low to put it in the webshop. We don’t think the King’s Gambit is the best way to play after 1.e4 e5, but these days anyone is struggling to find a good way to play. At least we have some interesting stuff to say; new concepts and a good deal of new ideas for both sides. We don’t promise an advantage – but we do promise publication!

The same is the case with the Tarrasch book. We are far – we have completed all analysis. I perform a final check in the writing phase, but that is about it. There are so many new ideas and concepts in this book, that we think it will move the theory forward by years. Chess is far from exhausted.

Finally, here is the wild guess about publication dates for the next few books:

These weeks we are finishing a few books, all ready about the same time. The following books are all but done:

Tactimania (pdf excerpt)

Grandmaster Battle Manual (pdf excerpt)

Grandmaster Repertoire 8 – The Grunfeld Defence (pdf excerpt)

Grossmeister Repertoire 5 – Die Englisch Eroffnungen (pdf excerpt)

My apologies for spelling mistakes and missing umlauts. I am simply to ill to care. I have gone to work the last three days with fever, to ensure that these books are coming out. And I am not the only one. I hear coughing all around me throughout the day. John claims his brain is melted, and is probably right on the money, as he claimed he had finished Chapter 6 of Grandmaster Battle Manual a week ago, but in reality had only typed in the page numbers for Chapter 5 twice!

A combination of such insidents means that this is a likely publishing schedule for the next few months.

This is not all the books that we have planned to publish, but it is the ones I feel confident about saying something definite about at the moment.

At times we have to admit to great limitations when it comes to planning. We believed that Grandmaster Repertoire 8 – The Grunfeld Defence was going to be 550 pages – but as we are getting closer to finishing the book, we have realised that 700 pages is more likely.

We cannot do this; it is too much.

We have thus decided to split the book into two volumes. We will have Grandmaster Repertoire 8: The Grunfeld Defence Volume 1 and Grandmaster Repertoire 9: The Grunfeld Defence Volume 2. We have lowered the price, but overall it will of course be more expensive. We are sorry about this, but nothing else makes sense.

Those who have already ordered the book on our website will of course receive both volumes at no additional charge, or they can contact us demanding a refund. However, we hope these customers will see this as a bonus – two books for the price of one.

One knock-on effect of this change is we have to renumber the book previously known as GM9. It is now Grandmaster Repertoire 10: The Tarrasch Defence.

Quality Chess is pleased to host a fourteen-hour training seminar over four days with probably the most renowned theoretician in the world. GM Boris Avrukh has worked with Gelfand, Kramnik and Caruana and is currently the trainer of the Israeli national team.

The sessions will be divided into two themes: the opening and the middlegame.
Thursday the 5th 19-22: Preparation at Grandmaster level
Friday the 6th 19-22: Developments in Avrukh’s 1.d4 repertoire
Saturday the 7th 14-18: Prophylactic Play
Sunday the 8th 12-16: Aggressive Play

Venue: Quality Chess office, Central Chambers, 93 Hope Street, Suite 45 (Mezzanine floor). Entrance next to Caffe Nero, opposite Glasgow Central Station.

Price: £120 for all four days. 50% discount for juniors and those living outside Scotland who travel here to attend. £60 for a single day attendance. If we have more than 20 full paying customers (or equivalent income) every participant will get a free copy of a Quality Chess book. Every participant will receive a 25% discount on QC books bought during the lectures.

Payment method: To reserve your place, please send a cheque made out to Jacob Aagaard to 20 Balvie Road, Glasgow, G62 7TA, UK. Please also confirm via e-mail to jacob@qualitychess.co.uk.

Born in 1978 in Kazakhstan, Boris started playing chess at the age of 6. His first big win was the Soviet u-12 Championship (beating among others Sergey Movsesian). Later the same year he won the u-12 World Championship. In 1991 he won silver in the u-14 European Championship. In 1995 his family moved to the famous chess city of Beer-Sheva in Israel, where Boris received a lot of support from the director of the Beer-Sheva Chess Club, Ilyau Levant. From 1995-2000 Boris worked with Grandmasters Mark Tseitlin and Alexander Huzman (Gelfand’s coach for many years). The work bore fruit and in 1998 he became a grandmaster.

Boris’s debut as a chess writer was Grandmaster Repertoire 1 – 1.d4 Volume One in 2008 and he was immediately hailed as one of the world’s top chess theorists. The book’s impact on top level and amateur chess has been exceptional and also brought great success to Quality Chess. In 2010 Boris repeated this success with the second part of his repertoire: Grandmaster Repertoire 2 – 1.d4 Volume Two. In June his new book, Grandmaster Repertoire 8 – The Grunfeld Defence will be published. All of these books are published by Quality Chess.
From 1998 to 2009 Boris played for the Israeli national team. His success as an author, and subsequent training and lecturing jobs, meant that he was not selected for the 2010 Olympiad due to the principle that only full-time players should be in the team, although he was clearly strong enough. The national coach decided Boris’s abilities were better used as a second and he now works for the Israeli national team in that capacity.