Congratulations from everyone at Quality Chess to GM Gawain Jones, the new European Blitz Champion! The event was held on-line for obvious reasons, with Gawain topping a stellar field, including beating GM David Navara in the semi-final and GM Alexei Shirov in the final.
Gawain is of course the author of two superb books on the Dragon. And Gawain will be back as a Quality Chess author in 2021 when we publish his 1.e4 repertoire books – his recommended variations are dangerous but not the biggest-theory main lines, so we are calling it the 1.e4 Coffeehouse Repertoire. No publication date is fixed, but somewhere in the first half of the year.
This seems as good a place as any to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
If you are watching TV in the USA this evening, there is a chance you may see a Quality Chess book lurking as a ‘background prop’. It is on a show called “The Blacklist”, 8:00–9:00 PM EST 13th December on NBC . Apparently there is also an NBC app.
It’s not certain The Thinkers will make the ‘final cut’. And even if it does, the book does not feature in the story; it’s just part of the background scenery. But I hope the point will be to show that one of the main characters has great taste in books.
If you do see David Llada’s book on NBC, then please let us know in the comments. As we Hollywood types say – that’s a wrap.
Small Steps to Giant Improvement by Sam Shankland has been available on Chessable for some time, but now extra video content can also be bought. It’s over 10 hours of Sam on video, being instructive. As is usual on Chessable, new content is introduced at a sales price, so if you are interested in this video then go for it in the first week.
You can see the introduction to Sam’s video below.
Boris Avrukh was recently interviewed by Chess Life writer John Hartmann. A webpage about the interview is here, while the direct Youtube link is here.
Top-level chess kicks off for the year tomorrow with the huge Tata Steel event in Wijk aan Zee in the Netherlands. There are many tournaments, with most focus on the Masters which has an elite field headed by World Champion Magnus Carlsen. Also hoping to make an impact will be US Champion Sam Shankland.
Naturally the Quality Chess connection to Sam is his book Small Steps to Giant Improvement. But if you prefer to receive Sam’s pawn-related instruction in video form, then below is a lecture Sam gave at the St Louis Chess Club.
My girlfriend gets upset with me whenever I claim to be old. She does not remember the fall of the wall at all, while I remember the Iran hostage crisis. I cry about the death/retirement of Rock ‘n Roll, while she sees it as a genre of Classical music, as I see Mozart, Gershwin or Charlie Parker. A decade ago Yusupov told me he participated in the European Championship and played eleven GMs between 2500 and 2600 of whom he had never heard at all! This was his “I am from the past” Epiphany. I have lots of them these days and honestly I enjoy them. I like the way new chess publishers are trying new things. As the old fart I am, I like what we do best of course, this is why we do it this way. But I really like that things are moving forward. Yesterday I was made aware of two videos by GM Mykhaylo Oleksiyenko, whom I honestly still thought of as 21 years old. Actually, he is 32 and has three beautiful children, as the internet informs me. But thank you for Michael to making me aware of these videos, they are very complimentary to me. The first one deals with the method of the three questions in a tactical setting, with a position I first saw in Byron Jacob’s wonderful little book Analyse to Win, but there were a small mistake, which was the justification for me including it in Excelling at Chess Calculation, with some chat.
This one is a bit harder and I have to confess that I got it wrong! But it is all very logical and instructive.
Overall this first visual encounter with Mykhaylo Oleksiyenko was been a total pleasure for me. Not so much because of the nice recommendation of the three questions, but more because of the clarity and high level of his explanations of the positions. If you are looking for a private trainer, I think he teaches on Chess.com, which apparently is not just about Puzzle Rush… You can find him on Facebook here.
If you want to know your opening repertoire well, you need time to memorise it. Some of it will make a lot of sense and some of it will be concrete, but counter-intuitive. Sometimes a line a tempo down is no worse, for example.
I just played a blitz game where I successfully remembered all of John’s analysis on the Alekhine, but ran out of time… As online blitz games have no relevance for the real world, I am still pleased by being able to get all the way to +-. After this I missed mate in four and lost on time in a totally winning position. But who cares…
The main reason I remembered the line, was because of an attractive shot in this position (did not really happen). Often these types of anchors and little nuggets of information helps us remember what comes before.
White to play. What is the strongest continuation?
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