Quality Chess Blog

With temperatures of -21.6 in Scotland it is clear that Winter has hit our small nation hard, not to speak of the Quality Chess office. We have several times struggled to find our way home. On Tuesday Jacob spent 15 minutes in a queue of 52 people (and time to count it) to buy his ticket home. Wednesday he was wise enough to buy it at 1pm. However, at 5.28 pm, when he was at the platform, all trains going West out of Glasgow were cancelled. He went to the ticket booth to get a refund, but was there (after waiting 10 min. in the queue) told that the train was at the platform. He ran down. The train doors were closed. Ran all the way up to the driver (50 metres?). The driver looked at him and took off. Back up to the booth. Wait in line? Not a chance, jumped the queue. Was refused a refund as the ticket had been purchased more than one hour previously! Thought about killing someone when a superior stepped in and authorised the refund. Went for the bus, never showed. A later one did. 10 km in 150 min. Can’t you walk this faster?

Oh yeah, and the office is bloody cold too.

In Quality Chess we have aspired to make the best chess books possible since our first books in 2004, Learn from the Legends and Experts vs. the Sicilian. Overall we believe we have been successful in our endeavours and have produced some memorable books, such as Understanding Chess Tactics, The Sveshnikov Reloaded and the Grandmaster Repertoire and Build up your Chess series, to mention but a few.

It is not in our nature to rest on our laurels. These past six years that we have worked on Quality Chess have been an uphill battle and a learning process. It has taken the time it takes to finish a masters degree, and we now think that we have graduated, receiving the first ever Boleslavsky Medal for the Build up your Chess series. On the way we were proud to win the Book of the Year from the ECF for San Luis 2005 and the ChessCafe.com prize for Learn from the Legends.

Ambitions should be ambitious, so we would like to share our aims for 2010:

1) In the first three months of 2010 we will supersede the quality (and possibly quantity) of our 2009 production.

2) Throughout all of 2010 we will do better than we have done before.

Jacob & John

Here, on New Year’s eve, I have finally uploaded Attacking Manual 2 to the printer. It will thus hopefully be ready for shipping from our warehouse from the 20th of January. I have uploaded the first 15 of the 464 pages as an excerpt. I will put it on the main site and so on, when I return to the office on the 5th. You can find the excerpt here.

We are working very hard. We have finished Attacking Manual 2 and only need to perform a final proofread before it goes to the printer. No problems with the 13th January publication date, last time I checked with them. We will also be sending two classics, My System and Questions of Modern Chess Theory for reprint in the near future. The same goes for Build up your Chess 2, which had run out. In that connection I should say that Boost your Chess 1 has been typeset and that only proofreading and correcting commas remains. It is on schedule for the 27th January publication, but would be pushed back 1-2 weeks, should we not be able to finish GM2 in time.

Because it is of course Boris Avrukh’s follow-up to his first 1.d4 repertoire, Grandmaster Repertoire 2 – 1.d4 volume 2, where he will consider all other replies than 1…d5, which everyone is always asking about. It has been more than one year in the making, but the author is in good shape still, and has sent the final update (last week). As Boris is not a fluent English speaker, time is pressing on GM John Shaw to make it all sound beautiful. The 27th January is still possible, but it might be sharp. It requires that we hand in the book the 8th of January to the printer, a time where some of us are still hung over… Read more…

On the 9th of December we will publish GENIUS IN THE BACKGROUND and REGGIO EMILIA 2007/2008, if everything goes right. We are working away on the other books to the best of our ability. Andrew has edited AM2 and typeset 5 out of the six chapters. I am about to begin typesetting AM1 (2nd edition). Hopefully I can do it much better than the first time around.

GM Repertoire 2 is getting closer to existence. Boris says he needs two weeks to hand in the remaining chapters. A lot of the previous chapters have been seriously formatted and need a quick edit before typesetting.

Once this is done, John will focus on finishing the puzzle book. The material has been collected. We have 2000+ positions, gathered over the last five years, now we need to select.

Boost your Chess 1 is close to going to the printer.

The rest should be coming on well, as always, the question is how fast the three of us can get the work done.

We have been battling a bit with ill health, tax returns (and an inept, now fired, accountant), commas and the usual Scottish autumn weather. As a result everything has slided a bit.

Reggio Emilia 2007/2008 is printed, and can be ordered from our webshop, but we are not releasing it for wider distribution until Genius In the Background is ready. The concern is that of the smaller bookshops, who prefers to keep quantities higher, and thus postage costs low. For this reason we prefer to publish books two at a time.
Read more…

Israel did not play well at the European Team Championship in Novi Sad this year. Overall the team got 50%. The hero in a lot of their matches was Quality Chess author Boris Avrukh, who often was the sole winner in a 2,5-1,5 victory.
Read more…

We have an excerpt ready for Reggio Emilia 2007/2008, the tournament book about the Golden Jubilee edition of this famous tournament. I think the book is about 4-5 weeks away from publishing, meaning that the schedule has slided a little bit again. Let’s blame Andrew who is away at the European Team Championship as the English’ Women’s coach; he does not have time to read these pages…

The book is written partly by Mihail Marin and partly by the other participants in the event. The level of the event was very high and many great games were played there.