Quality Chess Blog

The Royal Mail is facing a series of strikes, mainly because they fear an effective sorting machine will put manual sorting workers out of work, as I understand it. At the moment the Royal Mail is losing a penny on every letter it delivers.

This conflict should not affect Quality Chess or purchases on our website. We will simply send all parcels from Poland until the conflict is resolved.

Quality Chess co-sponsors the Herbert Garrett Memorial grant in Italy, which supports up and coming talents; previously Vocaturo and Caruana, who are now GM’s. This year’s award was presented by World no. 6, Israeli GM Boris Gelfand. If you read Italian, you can find some information about the award here.

On the Sunday we all moved on to play the 12th edition of the 15-min rapid tournament in Rocca di Papa, a mountain village outside Rome. Gelfand was seeded 1st Read more…

Unfortunately it seems that Boris Avrukh is falling a bit behind his own and our expectations to what he would be able to do with Grandmaster Repertoire 2 here in the autumn. The book is close to being done, but there are many lines such as 1.d4 g6, 1.d4 e6 2.c4 f5 3.g3 Bb4+ that needs to be covered as well, and the grandmaster does not seem to be able to do everything before he is faced with tournament commitments. So, the book is pushed a bit down the list, with the updated publishing schedule looking like this:

As always, this is a prediction, not a promise!

OCTOBER
14th    Marin/Garrett    Reggio Emilia 2007/2008
28th    Tibor Karolyi    Genius in the Background
28th    Boris Avrukh    Grandmaster Repertoire 2 – 1.d4 Volume Two
NOVEMBER
15th    Jacob Aagaard    Attacking Manual Volume 2
15th    Jacob Aagaard    Attacking Manual Volume 1 2nd edition
29th    John Shaw   Quality Chess Puzzle Book
29th    Boris Alterman    The Alterman Gambit Guide – White Gambits
29th    Artur Yusupov    Boost your Chess 1
2010
John Shaw    The King’s Gambit
Lubomir Ftacnik   Grandmaster Repertoire 5 – The Sicilian Defence

Finally! Yesterday we got a copy of Marin’s new book, Grandmaster Repertoire 3 – The English Opening Volume One, here at the office. There was a general skirmish before John managed to take the copy aside as his own.

I am of course deeply biased, but I think Mihail has done it again and produced his best book. I actually think that every book he has written has been better than the one before, with there of course being a debate whether or not Learn from the Legends is better than Secrets of Attacking Chess, both of them personal favourites of mine.

The book includes many hundreds of novelties, lucid explanations, and a deep passion for the English. If I was not going to write the 1.e4 tomes myself in the coming year, I would be inspired to try out this fascinating repertoire, where pawn, piece and queen sacrifices are suggested as challenges to existing theory.

Finally I have written the last chapter of Attacking Manual 2, plus annotated three extra games for Attacking Manual 1. The main reason for doing a second edition of AM1 is that some people disliked the layout. I am one of those people. Also, I am sad to admit that there were a number of typos that should not have been there.

However, now the books are done! The first edit/proofread has been done and a second one is coming up soon. We want to polish these books and make sure we get no complaints about our effort this second time around.

I am honestly completely unsure about the quality of AM2. When I was done with AM1 I was absolutely sure that this was my best book (out of way too many) and that it would be a hit. However, no one really took notice and sales were generally disappointing.

The book also got absolutely slated by Jeremy Silman, who wrote several things where he knew better. Most importantly he complained that I had not contacted Watson to discuss the topics in AM1, which ever so slightly relates to Watson’s work, something I recognised in the introduction. I had actually asked Watson, through Silman, if he wanted to veto anything I wrote in the book, as the last thing I wanted to do was to offend him. I was told that he did not want this power and that I should thus just write what I wanted.

In Silman’s review there is also a reference to a grandmaster’s limited understanding of a position. I am sure he means the game by Tiger-Hillarp Persson against Grooten, where he misses 22.Bc4!, which would just win. Actually I had a chance to talk to Tiger about this game not long after the book was out (I gave him a copy). Rather than being insulted about this passage, he was thinking a lot about it, not understanding why this “obvious” move did not occur to him during the game, and if there really were anything he needed to correct in his chess understanding.

Grandmasters do not know or understand everything and are not only assaulted by oversights and time trouble, as Silman said in his review. But it is easy to forgive Silman this mistake, as he has no first hand experience on this topic.

I have refused the temptation to include any of this rant in the books, as no one would care. However, now it is at least to be found on this obscure blog.

The two books are projected to be out in October.

In his excellent Checkpoint column at Chesscafe, FM Carsten Hansen gives Sabino Brunello’s Attacking the Spanish a 5/5 review.

However, Quality Chess does get some criticism for being too pushy with our author:

“The back cover tell us that the author “is one of the leaders of the youthful revival in Italian chess” and that he “is still a teenager, but his rating is already 2550 and increasing daily. By the time this book is printed he will probably be a grandmaster.” This is an odd embellishment to say the least. A quick check on FIDE’s website shows that he has yet to become a grandmaster (at least the title hasn’t been awarded yet) and his rating is down. However, the poorly worded promotion was completely unnecessary, because he is already a stronger player than most authors today.”

You can fairly accuse us of pushing our book and our author. We are terribly proud of both, especially as Sabino is also my student. However, when we send a book to the printer in June, please do not have a go at us for not predicting that the author might lose rating points in August! (And sadly September too.) Sabino has two norms and is a very strong player. He will be a GM the moment he makes the third norm. This can happen at any moment, for example at the World Juniors in Argentina in October.

In our next release, Champions of the New Millennium, we have  changed the type of paper we are using. Instead of the usual Multioffset paper, we are using the classier Galerie paper. This works very well with the colour photos in the book and makes the book.

The quality of the paper made me think about the pricing of our books. In 2004, we charged 24.99 euros for Experts vs. the Sicilian, today we are charging 24.99 for the GM Repertoire books as well as this new (colour photo) book. You would think that in a world where prices are increasing rapidly, that this should slowly move us towards the cheaper end of the spectre, but this appears not to be the case.

Gambit and Everyman have lowered their prices, as they are operating their business in pound sterling. They can do this because they print in the UK and distribute from here as well. We are printing in Estonia and distributing from Poland, so our expenses are in euros only. Compared to for example New in Chess and Chess Stars, Quality Chess are actually cheaper.

It should of course be mentioned that the books from Gambit and Everyman, which cost 18.99 or 19.99 euros, are usually 128-160 pages on low quality paper. Compared to these, a 456 book on high quality paper, should not be 24.99, but 49.99…

All in all, the world has turned and left us here. But I am actually quite happy with where we are standing. Maybe we will stay here a little longer…

Here is the latest publishing projections. The main change in dates is because of the IM-tournament in Edinburgh starting the 12th, that we are not only sponsoring, but also means that we have to be without Andrew for a week.

SEPTEMBER
9th    Ftacnik, Kopec & Browne    Champions of the New Millennium
9th    Mihail Marin    Grandmaster Repertoire 3 – The English Opening vol. 1
OCTOBER
14th    Marin/Garrett    Reggio Emilia 2007/2008
14th    Tibor Karolyi    Genius in the Background
14th    Boris Avrukh    Grandmaster Repertoire 2 – 1.d4 Volume Two
28th    Jacob Aagaard    Attacking Manual Volume 2
28th    Jacob Aagaard    Attacking Manual Volume 1 2nd edition
NOVEMBER
15th    John Shaw    Quality Chess Puzzle Book
15th    Boris Alterman    The Alterman Gambit Guide – White Gambits
15th    Artur Yusupov    Boost your Chess 1
DECEMBER
1st    John Shaw    The King’s Gambit
1st    Lubomir Ftacnik    Grandmaster Repertoire 5 – The Sicilian Defence