Quality Chess Blog

The eagerly anticipated World Cup began in Baku on Friday afternoon, and the chess community can undoubtedly look forward to over three weeks of high quality competition and drama.

For Quality Chess aficionados, however, there was much more than a World Cup at stake. Just as the first turn is often the most exciting part of a Formula 1 Grand Prix, our readers were glued to the initial 10 seconds of action to see which opening move would prevail. It transpires that players choosing the closed games simply have too many fiddly move order options available to them, while if you want to play 1.e4 you tend to just play 1.e4. In the end the result was fairly decisive, with 1.e4 streaking to a 6 point lead after round 1.1 and holding on comfortably in the return leg.

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Quality Chess will send a box of 20 books to your home, wherever in the world that may be. 10 of them chosen by you, 10 of them chosen by us. All you have to do is to predict some results in the World Cup. We will contact the winner once the World Cup is over and organize the shipment of the prize.

Hurdle Questions: In order for us to quickly reduce the number of emails to check, only participants who get the three initial questions right will proceed to the second round of scoring. The points scored here will count in the second round (unless otherwise stated, a correct answer is worth one point).

A: What will the most common opening move be in round 1 (excluding playoffs): 1.e4 or 1.d4 or neither?

B: Which of these home players will go further: Rauf Mamedov or Eltaj Safarli? (if knocked out at same stage then which one has played more moves is the tiebreak)

C: Which opening will be more common in round 3 (excluding playoffs)? Najdorf or Catalan or tie?

Main Competition Questions:

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I am wondering if we should call FROM GM TO TOP TEN for From GM to Queen of the Castle! Congratulations to Judit and Mihail; I hear they are opening the champagne bottle tonight!

Anyway, Quality Chess continues its reign, holding on to all of the top awards: ACP, ECF, ChessCafe and Chess Publishing. The only major award we do not currently hold is FIDE’s Boleslavsky award, which can only be won by registered chess trainers and where the competition is lower. We also have a lot of respect for the Guardian Award, but alas, we do not currently hold it as far as I know :-).

Yesterday I finished the last chapter for Endgame Play. As usual when finishing a book, I feel empty, ill and slightly beside myself. There is more work to do, of course, but the difficult (read: brain in active mode) part of the work is done.

I am considering updating my laptop. Any advice on a good one for chess purposes? Money is an issue (donations welcome), but I am really looking for a good one.

We have banned a person from commenting on our blog for the first time ever this week. Not only was he trolling John and myself, he was also becoming a nuisance for everyone else. We are hoping that we will not have to do this again for a long time; not the least because it is time consuming to have to block his repeated attempts to get around the block.

Some wrote on the blog that Quality Chess and especially I had done great service to chess. I understand where this comes from, but find it rather unfair to John. He has personally edited most of our top books: Learn from the Legends, GM1, How I Beat Fischer’s Record, Attacking Manual 1, Pump up your Rating, Tiger’s Modern and so on. Besides this, he just won the Chess Publishing book of the year for The King’s Gambit, despite a vicious campaign against him. John and I have always been 50-50, though I think he is putting in more work and creating more value than I.

Besides this, John is my boss! He has the final say on everything, as we believe someone has to have this power.

Andrew Greet has also contributed greatly over the years. His work with Tibor Karolyi’s books as well as Berg, Kotronias, Mikhalevski, Attacking Manual 2, various GM Repertoire books and so on, should not be underestimated.

Our other employees, Colin, Claire, Nikos and Danny have to be content with praise in private.

Next up for me is some pre-editing on the Grivas book, the Sveshnikov Sicilian and then maybe a chess tournament!?

Congratulations to Axel Smith! Pump up your Rating is the 2013 ChessCafe Book of the Year.

From the moment I read the first draft of the first chapter, I had high hopes for this book and I am delighted other readers are just as enthusiastic. As the book’s publishers we are of course biased, but I would say Axel is a highly deserving winner. He put a remarkable effort into writing his book and then trying to improve it. If you have not already read Pump up Your Rating (if so, why not?) then you can get a flavour of it from this pdf excerpt.

Dear Quality Chess Reader,

All modesty aside, we must announce another Quality Chess prize winner – in fact a 1-2. Jacob Aagaard won the Association of Chess Professionals’ 2013 Book of the Year prize for Grandmaster Preparation: Calculation. In second place, just one vote behind, was How I Beat Fischer’s Record by Judit Polgar. My personal congratulations to both authors.

This award means that Jacob is the chess author who has won the most prizes – ACP, ECF, Boleslavsky, ChessCafe and Guardian. It was close with Mark Dvoretsky and John Nunn before, but Jacob now has his nose in front.

In a supersized chess file (pdf or pgn) there are many games from the Danish Championship and Danish Blitz Championship, plus analysis that updates and adds to Grandmaster Repertoire 12: The Modern Benoni. The new Danish Champion is GM Davor Palo, but who is their new Blitz Champion? It was another prize for GM Jacob Aagaard.

Regards,

John Shaw

Chief Editor

Quality Chess

Dear Quality Chess reader,

On Friday 15th March we published three new books.

Grandmaster Repertoire 12: The Modern Benoni by Marian Petrov provides a complete repertoire for Black after 1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 c5 3.d5 e6. The repertoire is sharp and ambitious but not overwhelming in the demands it places on Black’s memory.

Strategic Play is the third in Jacob’s Grandmaster Preparation series. The chess is challenging and instructive with plenty of exercises to stretch your understanding. On a shallower note, Strategic Play has my favourite cover of all the books we have published.

Soviet Middlegame Technique by Peter Romanovsky is the latest in our Classics series. It is a fresh translation of what were originally two books – one on planning and the other on combinations. I prefer others to write our sales text for us, so GM Kotov on Romanovsky: “One of the best books in the world’s chess literature.”

Sales news: on our site we have a new range of special offers. The webpage shows Read more…