Quality Chess Blog

Grandmaster Jacob Aagaard is going to India to promote his Grandmaster Preparation series in March/April. His tour will give lectures and training seminars in Mumbai (26-27 March), Ahmadabad (28-29 March), New Delhi (30-31 March), Kolkata (2-3 April) and Chennai (4-5 April).

Hi guys, what are you planning to do this spring. Here is my plans…

The book is already out on Forward Chess and will be published in physical form on Wednesday (available in chess book shops everywhere!). I managed to have a chat with Thomas about the book in general. Unfortunately I am still in my early days in learning to use this software. Nikos said I forgot to click on bottom, which meant I look a bit slimmer than usual! Apparently it is not that bad…

The Pgn can be found here. There are no variations this week though…

Yesterday we published three books, Dynamic Decision Making in Chess by Boris Gelfand, the second volume in his series. Grandmaster Repertoire 1B – The Queen’s Gambit, which is the second out of four books in Boris Avrukh’s reimagining of a 1.d4 repertoire. And finally Grandmaster Repertoire – 1.e4 vs. the Sicilian III by Parimarjan Negi, which is the fourth volume out of six. All three authors will continue their work on these projects and release more books next year.

Tomorrow the Baku Olympiad begins. We have created a small Quiz, where the winner will win a box of chess books, sent to anywhere in the World. Please go to this link to see the conditions for entering (which is mainly to structure the email according to the example!).

Andrew, John and Colin are all playing in the Olympiad for Scotland, while Nikos is the captain of the Danish team. Claire and I will stay at home. Orders will go out as usual, but single purchases might take 1-2 days longer before they go in the mail.

We will put another newsletter together after the Olympiad – with actual chess content!

Adding to this newsletter, I would like to say that once the Olympiad is over and everyone are back, we will be able to work out exactly where we are with various projects. I have a bit of news now, which is that the Ragozin and the final Kotronias book on the KID are basically done from the authors and will be big priorities. King’s Indian Warfare and Grandmaster Repertoire 19 – Beating Unusual Openings are both going to print this weekend and a few other books are nearing completion. I know at least of one author who is done and just rechecking stuff. But he is playing in Baku too, so probably we will get that book delivered once the guys are back.

Excerpts will be slow in coming. I am busy and Colin is in Baku. We still don’t have an official publication date for these two books. It will be close to radio silence from us for the next two weeks; except that I will pop in, do the Monday poll and a few other minor things.

Last week’s poll question was: ‘Is 3 points for a win a good system for chess?’ The vote was strongly ‘no’, but with some support in comments for ‘yes, but only occasionally and at the elite level’.

This week’s poll will be a Quiz! Our quiz topic is the Baku Olympiad.

The prize is the same as always: ten Quality Chess books of your own choice and ten Quality Chess books of our choice (see our typical freebie list of books where we published too many copies compared to the audience; or undiscovered masterpieces, if you like). We will send it with FedEx or UPS to your home address.

Deadline: one hour before the start of play on September 2nd, 15.00 Baku time.

Quality Chess will be the final and only arbiter of what the correct answers are! In this event of a tie, the tiebreaker will be how close to correct you are on Question 3.

The entry HAS to follow the following layout (see example below). If they do not, we will ignore your entry. The layout is based on making it easy to copy and paste it into an excel sheet. Here are the requirements:

Send an email to OlympiadQuiz2016@qualitychess.co.uk. Write whatever you want in the topic line; we will ignore it anyway…

NICKNAME
Answer 1
Answer 2

And so on. Each on a new line. Just the answer: number or one word.

Full name and address where you would like the books sent to. Please make sure that this is a place where someone can sign for the parcel. Updated with bold and underlining. No address, no entry!

If your entry does not follow this setup, sorry, you will not participate this time around. I do not want to spend time restructuring your entry in a competition where I donate the prizes :-).

The Questions:

Read more…

During XtraCon Open in Helsingor, Boris and I enjoyed a bit too much of the free buffet food (gosh I look fat; luckily the diet has already begun) and a two hour lecture about the writing of Positional Decision Making in Chess. No spoilers from the book though… All of it was original material.

During XtraCon Open in Helsingor, Denmark, I got to spend some time together with Boris Gelfand, face to face, for the first time since the Tromso Olympiad. Since then we have written two books together.

The most important thing we did was of course to get around to answer all of your questions. It took a little longer than we expected (Boris refused to be effective, wanted to be generous with his time instead), but anyway, here are the two videos.

I was not sure if I should mention people by name. I decided against it, as it gave me the freedom to rephrase the questions at time. Hope getting them answered was the main thing!