Quality Chess Blog

After a tough fight, Boris Avrukh’s Grandmaster Repertoire 2 won the public vote for the ChessPublishing Book of the Year prize. Congratulations to Boris and thanks to all those who voted.

Last year the first volume of Mihail Marin’s 1.c4 GM Repertoire won this prize, so ChessPublishing regulars clearly have excellent taste. Next year we shall attempt to three-peat.

The ChessCafe website has a very democratic approach to deciding its Book of the Year prize: readers e-mail their votes for their favourite book of 2010. Three Quality Chess books are on the list of nominees – The Attacking Manual 1 and The Attacking Manual 2 by Jacob Aagaard, and Boost Your Chess 1 by Artur Yusupov.

Anyone who wishes to vote for any of the nominated books (even, good grief, one not published by Quality Chess) should e-mail their vote to bookoftheyear@chesscafe.com by January 17. After that the three highest placed books face a second round of voting from January 19 to 31. The winner will be announced on February 2.

We have been so busy working away that it has taken us until the 7th of January to wish our readers a Happy New Year.

We recently announced two new books:

Experts on the anti-Sicilian will be edited by Jacob and me, and we will also a write a few chapters. Many other authors are also sharing their Sicilian wisdom including GMs Peter Heine Nielsen, Boris Avrukh, Tiger Hillarp Persson, Milos Pavlovic, Christian Bauer and Matthieu Cornette. Only one IM is involved in this project – Andrew Greet, who was allowed in as Scottish Champion.  The topic, of course, is  Sicilian lines except the Open variations. Please note, this is not a repertoire book, but it will offer many new ideas for both sides.

In The Grandmaster Battle Manual Greek GM Vassilios Kotronias shares the lessons he has learned as a highly competitive 2600+ player. We are delighted Vassilios has started writing for Quality Chess as we admire his previous books and know him to be a tremendous analyst.

On the website you can also download our brand new 2011 catalogue which, among other things, gives a complete list of our titles.

Dear Quality Chess Reader,

If you live near London you will soon have the chance to attend lectures by two of our authors. Grandmasters Jacob Aagaard and Boris Avrukh will be giving talks at the London Chess Classic. Jacob’s will be on December 14; Boris’s date has yet to be confirmed. On the same day as his lecture, Jacob will be awarded the ECF Book of the Year Prize for Attacking Manuals 1 and 2.

We at Quality Chess are currently working mainly on four books: Boost Your Chess 3 by Artur Yusupov, Chess Lessons by Vladimir Popov, The Cutting Edge 2: The Sicilian Najdorf 1 by Milos Pavlovic and Experts on the anti-Sicilians edited by Jacob Aagaard and John Shaw.

Boost Your Chess 3 is the latest volume in GM Yusupov’s award-winning instructional series. The “3” in the title tells the reader this is at the Mastery level. Yusupov’s series increases in difficulty from The Fundamentals (1) to Beyond the Basics (2) and then finally Mastery.

In Chess Lessons, Vladimir Popov shares the chess wisdom he accumulated while coaching many promising juniors. In particular the book offers many lessons from the games of Popov’s two most celebrated pupils, the Kosintseva sisters. Tania and Nadia Kosintseva were recently in action as the top two seeds at the Russian Women’s Championship. At the following link you can read a sample chapter.

In The Cutting Edge 2: The Sicilian Najdorf 1 GM Milos Pavlovic analyses various state-of-the-art lines in the Sicilian Najdorf (with the exception 6.Bg5 which will be covered in the next Cutting Edge book).
 
Experts on the anti-Sicilian is written by a host of grandmasters (including Peter Heine Nielsen, Boris Avrukh, Christian Bauer, Matthieu Cornette, John Shaw, Jacob Aagaard, Milos Pavlovic and Tiger Hillarp Persson). The book covers various lines of the Sicilian where White avoids playing the Open Variation (2.Nf3 and 3.d4).

The chess file links below have various interesting pieces of analysis including GM Mihail Marin’s response to some questions about Grandmaster Repertoire 4 and Grandmaster Repertoire 5: the books which completed his 1.c4 repertoire. There is also plenty of original analysis by GM Jacob Aagaard that is relevant to several of our books. The chess files are available in pdf or ChessBase format.

Two of the books we published in the early years of Quality Chess were Tiger’s Modern by Tiger Hillarp Persson and The Benko Gambit by Jan Pinski. We ran out of copies of these two books so we are currently reprinting them. They will be available next week.

Regards,

John Shaw
Chief Editor
Quality Chess

Attacking Manual 2 has received another honour: the Guardian newspaper, specifically GM Danny King and Ronan Bennett, selected the Attacking Manual 2 as their Book of the Year, ahead of rival works written by Kasparov, Seirawan and Watson. Of course, recently the English Chess Federation also selected Attacking Manuals 1 and 2 as their Books of the Year.

The Guardian judges wrote:

“Aagaard delivers opinionated and sometimes biting judgments, and more importantly, he has found some remarkable and original ideas that enrich our understanding of attacking play. This is a case where computer software has been put to good use to bring out the beauty in a game, but he is not a slave to the machine, going his own way when necessary. So congratulations to Aagaard and Quality Chess.”

The full column can be found at the Guardian website.

A business announcement: from January 1st we intend to increase our shipping charges to EU countries. This will be our first increase since 2004 and will not fully cover the real increase in costs since then, so we hope customers will not be too disappointed.

Our old rules were:

Shipping to European Union countries

• 3 Euros for 1 book
• 6 Euros for two books
• Free Shipping if you order 3 or more books

We are changing this to:

Shipping to European Union countries

• 5 Euros for 1 book
• 8 Euros for two books
• Free Shipping if you order 3 or more books

Plus the usual disclaimer:

“Note: It is the customer’s responsibility to provide a full and correct address, e-mail and phone number. Any problems arising from these details being incorrect is not the responsibility of Quality Chess UK Ltd “

So the only change is an increase of 2 Euros on the first book. There are two main reasons for this: increasing postage charges in general and the fact that our books are getting heavier. The shipping charges the customer pays will of course still be much lower than our real costs of posting the books.

Orders of 3 books or more (and sometimes orders of just 2 books) will be sent by UPS. If the customer is out when UPS calls, it is the customer’s responsibility to contact UPS. Sorry, we can’t do it for you.

Dear Quality Chess Reader,

Andrew Greet and I have just returned from the Olympiad in Khanty-Mansiysk, Siberia. Andrew was non-playing captain of the English Women’s team, who performed above expectations. I was Board 3 for the Scottish team in the Open section; we finished slightly below our seeding, despite beating all the teams we were meant to beat and only losing to our betters.

Back to the books: the final two volumes of Mihail Marin’s 1.c4 repertoire: Grandmaster Repertoire 4 and Grandmaster Repertoire 5 are being printed now and, if you live in Europe, October 15 is a good prediction of when you will be able to read them.

GM Christian Bauer’s Play the Scandinavian will also be available at the same time. Please note that this book concentrates on 1.e4 d5 2.exd5 Qxd5 3.Nc3 Qa5; fans of the quirky 3…Qd6 will have to look elsewhere.

Excerpts are available for all three books at the following links: Grandmaster Repertoire 4, Grandmaster Repertoire 5 and Play the Scandinavian.

Attached is a bumper collection of chess analysis: including various puzzles, a couple of Avrukh-crunching Grunfelds, a non-boring Exchange Slav and a friendly but spirited analytical debate between Jacob and Anish Giri. This is available in either ChessBase or pdf format.

Regards,

John Shaw

Chief Editor

Quality Chess

Dear Quality Chess Reader,

We recently received encouragement from England: Champions of the New Millennium and Jacob’s Attacking Manual 1 and Attacking Manual 2 were placed on the shortlist for the ECF Book of the Year prize. These were the only books we put forward for the prize and the judges’ comments were flattering.

Publication News: Play the Scandinavian by GM Christian Bauer will be out in late September. The French Super-GM is a noted expert on the 1.e4 d5 2.exd5 Qxd5 3.Nc3 Qa5 lines on which his book concentrates.

GM Mihail Marin will soon complete his repertoire for White with 1.c4: Grandmaster Repertoire 4 and Grandmaster Repertoire 5 should be out in October.

GM Boris Avrukh’s Grandmaster Repertoire 2 will be available in a German translation in late September. A hardcover version of the English version is available on our website and soon also in shops in Europe, plus probably Chess4Less and ChessCafe in the USA.

We are continuing our new idea of including a ChessBase file with the newsletter. This time it includes:

An update and some comments on Ftacnik’s Grandmaster Repertoire 6

A few updates on Schandorff’s Grandmaster Repertoire 7 – mainly relating to small things lacking in the book.

A nice game Andrew lost at the British, but also a win where he used an Avrukh novelty (“I well and truly Avrukhed him,”; Andrew told me.)

This ChessBase file is also available as a pdf printout for those without ChessBase – the same goes for the first newsletter.

More will follow about Grandmaster Repertoire 6 in another newsletter in a few weeks.

Regards, John Shaw

Chief Editor,

Quality Chess