Bogged down by work, we never got around to sharing pictures of the happy winners of the Olympiad Quiz and their winnings. Here they are, Piotr and Ferdo.
We are going to have a quiz for the World Championship with entries starting in a few weeks time and ending an hour before the first move is played. It would be great if you would help us with your possible questions for the quiz, making it possible for us to focus on books.
We have the winners of the Olympiad Quiz. And with winners, I do indeed mean winners. Read more…
If you want to follow how well things are going in the Olympiad Quiz, you can see how everyone have answered here.
You can enter the answers on your own and the sheet should calculate the points for all participants automatically. At least this is the theory!
We will find the winner when the tournament is over.
NB. Thank you to the 80% of participants that read the instructions and entered the competition correctly, without adding words that I then had to remove before I could enter them…
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:
White to play and win
The diagram position is a study by Steffen Slumstrup Nielsen. It’s part of a competition by the organizers of the Xtracon tournament in Denmark. You can read all the details at the previous link.
Solve the puzzle and you have the chance to win a ticket to the Boris Gelfand lecture “Dynamic Decision Making in Chess”, which will be held Thursday July 28th at 8 pm. at Konventum in Helsingør, Denmark. And collect a free copy of the book while you are there.
“White to move and win.” In the organizer’s words: “A correct solution contains as a minimum the main line until White’s move number 7”.
Please DO NOT give the answer in comments, and don’t email it to us either. ‘Solutions should be sent to organiser@xtraconchessopen.dk with the subject “Gelfand” no later than Saturday July 2nd.’
If you will not be in Denmark, then the competition is not much use to you, but solving the puzzle will still be fun. If you use an engine, we’ll know…
As you may recall, the winner of our Candidates Quiz was Stefan Sattler of Germany. We sent Stefan his prize and he very kindly sent us a photo to confirm the books arrived OK.
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