Quality Chess Blog

At times I am asked if strong GMs ever read books. The case with some of them is no. One GM I talked to this about a few years back said that he had not opened a chess book for 10 years and that they were all junk. I gave him Marin’s two books on 1.e4 e5, Beating the Open Games and A Spanish Repertoire for Black to see if he would change his mind. He did, and is now a regular customer, especially for Marin books…

It seems we have another fan. Hannes Stefansson apparently gave an interview (in Icelandic), explaining how he used his newly acquired copy of Beating the Open Games to beat French GM Nataf. I have annotated the game and stuck it in a pgn-file.

It is no secret that we in Quality Chess are a bunch of nerds, obsessively trying to take our books to a higher level. It is thus with great pride we noticed this morning that Mihail Marin was voted Opening book of the year on the site occupied by people like us, Chesspublishing.com. The link is here:  http://www.chesspub.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1257965955/115

Today we received 132 copies of GM2. Here at 12:50 Andrew and John have just taken off to the post office with the first 40 websales. They will soon be back for the next batch. The final result comes in at 1,025 grams (2.25 lbs) at our office scale (which was expensive) and looks damn good in our opinion. The photo is a bit clumsily doctored, but I did not want to struggle to pretend these guys could look good in a photo at the same time…

The first copies of GM2 have started to arrive various places. By luck, Niggemann seemed to get the books earlier than usual. People are telling us it is great – but we have not yet seen it!

We have moved a few things around in the publishing schedule, but with a new employee starting in two weeks, we hope that we will be able to keep those arbitrary deadlines now.

Hi guys, just an updated publishing schedule…

Friday night 1.15 am we uploaded GM Repertoire 2 – 1.d4 Volume Two to the printer in Estonia. Today they have started printing, using more than 6 ton of paper! We are very excited about this book. It is clearly our best book to date, I think, if you look at the chess content. The novelties probably amount to a 1000 and the impact on chess theory for this book is certain to equal if not dwarf that of GM1, which was reading material not just for chess fans hoping to improve, but also for players at the absolute top.

The book comes to 616 pages and will be available in a chess shop close to you at the end of February, if there are no more incidents with the Polish Border Patrols…

A small random excerpt of an idea I find quite amusing has been uploaded and can be found in the free e-book section. I will try to put it on the book as well, but I struggle to do so technically, so it might take a day or two…

Our warehouse has informed us that our books will not arrive today as scheduled. A bit of detective work shows that between the – 32.6 (“I am no eskimo” – our printer) and the -22 in Poland, apparently DHL has suffered a problem. It looks a bit like this:

Hopefully the books will arrive tomorrow…

Marin said the following about the 1.c4 c5 repertoire, which a lot of you have asked about:

Here is a draft plan for the 1…c5 part: White plays 2.g3 (as in all the lines of the whole repertoire, with the exception of 1…b6), thus avoiding the hedgehog. Against the reversed Maroczy I will analyze a system based on a2-a3 (You will find a couple of games of mine in the database). In the closed line, I recommend d2-d4 against e7-e6 (planning Nge7). In the lines classified under A39, starting with Qd4-d3, I will examine other lines than Khalifman (for instance, I prefer Be3 over Bd2).

As said earlier, I will stop giving exact estimated dates, as they are confusing people. An estimate is not a commitment, but how things will work out if everything runs smoothly. Alas, it rarely does, so I am coming with these rather vague dates instead. I hope they will concur better with people’s expectations.

Three books are confirmed for next Wednesday (Note to self – put Boost your chess 1 on the webshop). GM2 is written and a lot has been edited. However, the book is so big, so we are not 100% certain about the 17th February publication date.

Anyway, here is the list: