Quality Chess Blog

In Street Smart Chess, model players teach how to play against opponents of different strengths. The chapters do inevitably clash against each other. If one of the players want to create a tactical game and the other a boring game, both can’t succeed. The question is who manages best. A few days ago, David Navara mentioned that he will play Baskaran Adhiban in Mr. Dodgy Invitational. It was a test for both of them, as Navara’s chapter in Street Smart was beating lower rated opponents, and Adhiban’s was beating higher rated opponents. This time both could succeed with their intentions: winning games. After eleven games, they had played only one draw, with Navara winning 6,5–4,5. But did they follow their own advice? Let’s examine one win each.

David Navara (2697) – Baskaran Adhiban (2660)

MrDodgy Invitational 2 (1.7), 12.05.2021

Axel Smith

1.c4 g6 2.Nf3 Bg7 3.d4 Nf6 4.g3 0–0 5.Bg2 d6 6.0–0 Nc6 7.Nc3 Bd7 8.b3 e5 9.d5 Nb8 10.e4 a5 11.Ne1 Na6 12.Nd3 b6 13.Bg5 h6 14.Be3?!

Inviting Black’s next move.

14…Ng4 15.Bd2 f5

Adhiban first step in the ideal attacking game is to “strive for a pawn structure where it’s possible to throw pawns at the opponent’s king at a later stage.” King’s Indian is a good choice doing that.

Read more…

Quality Chess Academy takes place in a holiday resort on Crete, a sunny Mediterranean island. For a week, you get the chance to train daily with some of the best chess trainers in the world and get inspired to continue your work at home. It can be combined with playing the Cretan Chess Tour tournaments, before and/or after the training camp.

In November 2018 GM Jacob Aagaard and GM Boris Gelfand were the trainers. An amazing experience and a boost in chess performance, resulting in a participant to cross 2700 and securing an IM title for another.

Inspired by the overwhelmingly positive feedback for the November 2018 camp we decided to organise a camp for 8-14 May 2019. GM RB Ramesh joined Jacob as a trainer for a very successful camp for players of all levels,

In the titled group (IMs and GMs), we got some very impressive results; a championship, many second places, a GM title, +50-60 points up in a few cases, +30 in some others, with the biggest ELO gain +86 points for that group. In the non-titled group, things improved a lot as well, with +65 ELO points the biggest gain and we hope to celebrate the IM title soon!

Encouraged by these results and by the fact that many participants want to come back, we decided that two camps are needed for 2020. One in June 2020, 8-14 and one in October 2020, 12-18.

Yes, we added an extra day and kept the same price for 2020. In June 2020 we are giving you the chance to train in person with GM Jacob Aagaard and GM Sabino Brunello. GM Sam Shankland will join us, budget allowing.

The concept remains the same; top Quality Chess training for every participant.

Join us in Crete, bring your friends and family, enjoy a chess holiday for yourself and let them enjoy the amazing resort themselves!

You can find more information on our website, qualitychessacademy.com, on our Facebook page here https://www.facebook.com/qualitychessacademy or send an email to info@qualitychessacademy.com and if you register soon, you get a 20% discount for the service fee.

Yesterday I worked on the cover of Sam’s next book, Small Steps 2 Success. As someone who has been teaching Maths and Physics for years, I know how I am supposed to draw this. But what makes sense in my former world, doesn’t mean it’s the best-looking cover. So, I would like to hear your opinions on which cover you like most. I know, small changes, but that’s what makes a difference after all!?

Kallia

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About a year ago, I visited Jacob in lovely Glasgow and we made together a series of videos (5 of them) where he explained briefly his theory on the “Four Types of Decisions” we make in Chess. In this article, I’d like to talk about Type of Decision #1: Automatic Decisions and how I realized, one whole year later, why such a simple idea can have a huge effect on the level of the chess I (and I am sure also you) play. If you have no idea what are the “Four Types of Decisions”, you can check the introductory video of the series, where this legendary dialogue took place:

Jacob: “What is the one thing you should always do when you have an automatic decision?”

Nikos: “Maybe check if this is not the only move?”

Jacob: “He is not as stupid as he looks!”

If you want to expand on this topic, there are two books where this theory is explained in detail:

• Strategic Play (2013)

• Thinking Inside the Box (2017)

Also, you can check this video which is dedicated to this type of decision.

So, let me now share with you my recent experiences and why I think I (and you) should take seriously Jacob’s advice on that subject.

First of all, what is an automatic decision?

According to Jacob: “Moves we make almost without thinking”

Some players relate this thing to intuition, or to the first move that comes to mind or what I have heard many times as moves that we would have made in blitz.

Read more…

Blogpost by Kallia Kleisarchaki

 

During the Batumi Olympiad 2018, Sam Shankland met across the board Rauf Mamedov, Azerbaijani GM. Rauf didn’t buy Sam’s book and I know! How? Well, he did exactly the kind of mistake Sam warned about in his book, Small Steps to Giant Improvement, proving once again that every chess player, regardless titles, can make simple mistakes that cost dearly.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As Sam explains in page 232 of his book, “…Black has advanced a7-a5, so White will not be able to play b3-b4. As such, white is condemned to have a pair of doubled pawns where the further-advanced one cannot be protected from another pawn.”

 

What kind of simple mistakes have you made and you still remember them?

Andrew Greet asked if I would mind answering questions appearing in the comments to his blog posts. However, I see that Andrew has already done that, while also sharing his own experience. Thanks! It’s also nice to see all the readers’ efforts. I hope you have enjoyed all the hours of solving. Just like many of you, I consider the boring part to be checking the solutions. But sometimes it has to be done.

As I am afraid to find silly mistakes, I usually don’t read anything I have written after it’s published. But this time a reader gave the book back to me, with marks to a lot of games. “White and Black have been confused in too many games,” he said. “It’s not possible that the world champions blundered that often.”

But the book is right in this case – these blunders really were played by the elite, even though some of them were in simuls and exhibitions. Doesn’t it feel good to excel over a world champion?

However, one real error was accidentally added during editing: diagrams 11 and 18 are similar, but with the wrong solution to the first. Given the time it took me to solve the replacement exercise (pdf), I guess I need to Woodpecker!

My wife is already on the way. She hasn’t played in two years, but after smelling the new book (always the most important thing to her) she started solving. With limited time available, she skipped the introduction, and several times she asked me questions that definitely are discussed in the book.

“Read the introduction!” was my constant answer. Read more…

Some posts on this blog have drawn attention to the fact that the line 1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 d6 3.d4 cxd4 4.Nxd4 Nf6 5.f3 is not mentioned in Grandmaster Repertoire 6A – Beating the Anti-Sicilians by Vassilios Kotronias.

However, the line was featured in Experts on the Anti-Sicilian, where the recommended response was 5…e5 with coverage of the variations:

A) 6.Bb5† Nbd7 7.Nf5 d5 8.exd5 a6
A1) 9.Ba4
A2) 9.Bxd7†
B) 6.Nb3

We have decided to make this chapter freely available as a pdf here.

Andrew writes:

“Early this year we were interested to hear from Chris Wainscott, an enthusiastic amateur from the US and an avid fan of our books. Soon the ‘Quality Chess Challenge’ was born, and earlier this week we were excited to receive an update from Chris about his training.

We are pleased to present a guest blog post from the man himself, where you can find out about the goals he has set for himself and his progress so far.

Over to you Chris…”

Chris writes:

Before I delve in to detail, let me first take a moment to acquaint the readers of the Quality Chess blog with myself and the Quality Chess Challenge.

My name is Chris Wainscott and I am from the USA. I am 43 years old and currently working to prove that it’s quite possible to become a master after the age of 40. I stopped playing chess in 1992 and didn’t begin again until 2011. At that time my Elo was just under 1500; now I am 1800.

The Quality Chess Challenge came out of a discussion between a friend and myself that caused to me make the offhand remark to Jacob Aagaard that I felt that it would be possible for me to get to 2200 reading nothing but books published by QC.

So for one year, from 2/13/17 through 2/13/18 I am committed to training using only books published by Quality Chess. Of course I don’t expect to become a master in that time frame, but I do expect to show the value in using high quality training materials.

Right now I’m about one quarter of the way through the Challenge, so it’s time for a progress update.

We’ll start with the most obvious thing.

Read more…