Quality Chess Blog

We are continuing our special offer – if you buy three books or more and live inside the European Union (as defined by UPS) we will send you an extra book free.
For the past two months, the default option on the free book has been Tactimania but we will change that now to GRANDMASTER VS AMATEUR.

But if you already have GRANDMASTER VS AMATEUR or would prefer a different free book, then send us an email with your order, asking to have it replaced with one of the following titles:

TACTIMANIA
TRUE LIES IN CHESS
CHAMPIONS OF THE NEW MILLENNIUM
SAN LUIS 2005
ATTACKING THE SPANISH
GRANDMASTER VS AMATEUR
REGGIO EMILIA 2007

Also, the excerpt of Avrukh’s Grandmaster Repertoire 1A – The Catalan is now available at the following link. We are still waiting for the final word from the printer, but the publication date looks like April 29th.

My endless to-do list for next week includes working on a Playing 1.e4 book (yes, it will exist) and reading a lot of Razuvaev title suggestions. One of Ray’s suggestions “Razuvaev on Gambits” is a title I had suggested earlier in the office. If we use that title, do I get the free book?

It is with a heavy heart that we have come to the realisation that John will not be able to complete his work on the 1.e4 books. He is half way through the first book, but overburdened by managerial work and the responsibility to our authors, who deliver on time, to get their books out quickly and efficiently.

We apologise to everyone who were looking forward to these books. At least we have the Negi-books for you 1.e4 guys…

Read more…

Apparently it is another intelligent marketing ploy to call an, as yet, untitled book in our publishing schedule Hoolabaloo in the draft of the last blog post I wrote. As Colin had edited something incorrectly in a previous blog post, he thought it was a cute way of drawing extra attention to the book. What can I say? Can’t keep raw talent down?!

The book is a small book – probably 128 pages – in the Classics series by one of the true greats of chess writing, Yuri Razuvaev. It is about various ideas in the opening, mainly gambits, written in 2003. A nice light read. The Russian title does not translate well, so we are looking for a cool idea for a title.

Obviously there is a prize – a free copy of the book and your name on page two will be awarded for the best title – the one we use that is. Suggestions below. We will make a decision at our editorial meeting on Monday.

Here it is, I am going to make some accurate predictions about a few future publications. Accurate, in the sense that I will give dates when I believe these books will be out. How accurate this turns out to be only time will tell. So here are my predictions:

29th April
Boris Avrukh’s book Grandmaster Repertoire 1A – The Catalan will be our big release of course. Let me underline again (and again) that this is a new book. Yes, there is a small overlap with the first volume and a few lines that are repeated. But Boris has done the work and fans of the first book should be happy with this book as well.
The other release is a book in the Classics series, Python Strategy (in our opinion a better title than “The Strategy of Soundness”) with collected writings by Tigran Petrosian. We are very happy with this book and we hope you will be too.

20th May
A triple release date. First of all, there is Boris Gelfand’s Positional Decision Making in Chess, which in my honest opinion is a great release. But then I am biased.
Then there is Learn from the Legends – 10th Anniversary Edition by Mihail Marin. This is our most popular book from the first ten years of our company. I hope this new version will find an audience. It deserves it.
Finally, there is a little book by Razuvaev on gambits, called HOOLABALOO in the Classics series.

June somewhere
Another triple publication! Lars Schandorff’s Grandmaster Repertoire 20 – The Semi-Slav, Tibor Karolyi’s Tal’s Best Games 2 – The World Champion and John Shaw’s Playing 1.e4 – Caro-Kann, 1…e5 & Minor Lines.

1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 e6 3.g3

This is the starting position for Boris Avrukh’s new volume: Grandmaster Repertoire 1A – The Catalan. The title is slightly misleading, as the book also covers the Bogo-Indian and Benoni systems that can occur via this move order. However, we decided to mention the Catalan in the title as it receives the lion’s share of the coverage. The purpose of this short post is to give you a few brief examples of what you can expect to see in the book. Some recommendations have stayed broadly the same (while still being updated and improved of course), but there are several important variations where Boris has gone in a completely different direction.

Let’s start with the Benoni.

3…c5 4.d5 exd5 5.cxd5 d6 6.Nc3 g6 7.Bg2 Bg7 8.Nf3 0–0 9.0–0 Re8
9…a6 10.a4 leads to the same sort of stuff.

10.Bf4
Previously Boris recommended 10.Nd2 a6 11.a4 Nbd7 12.h3 Rb8 13.Nc4 Ne5 14.Na3, but a problem line has emerged in the form of 14…Nh5 15.e4 Bd7 16.a5 b5 17.axb6 Bb5!. Marian Petrov was right on the money when he recommended this for Black in Grandmaster Repertoire 12 – The Modern Benoni.

10…a6
10…Ne4 11.Nxe4 Rxe4 12.Nd2 is another option, when the different placement of the a-pawns changes some details.

11.a4 Ne4 12.Nxe4 Rxe4 13.Nd2
Boris has plenty of ideas in this well-known line.

And next, the Catalan… Read more…

Usually I write mainly about what we are doing as a team in the office, write a few more complicated posts about things I am thinking about and so on. But I have not written much about what I have been doing personally the last year – for a simple reason – I have not been doing much…

Most of the people I know at the age of 40-42 seem to be going through a rough path. I alluded to this recently with my very subtly titled post “midlife crisis”.

Last year I would have rejected the idea that it is a moment where you take stock and decide what you want to do for the rest of your life. I would have said that it was an energy question; your body no longer renews itself and you have all these pressures of work, children and depleting energy reserves on top. It just becomes too much and you feel it on a level where you cannot put words on it.

I still like this way of explaining what happens, but I have definitely taken stock and I have made some big changes in my life. All of them for the better. The most positive was to buy one luxury product to go with my IKEA furniture and general discount lifestyle (I am the 2-for-1 king and the reduced aisle stalker…). I bought a BMW 318d Sport. Used of course, but still. It is a really nice car.

But back to what I really wanted to write about: what I am writing.

Boris Gelfand: Positional Decision Making in Chess

I am getting close to the end. This book has really caused me a lot of resistance. Boris has been great – it has been all me and probably this is where I have suffered most in my midlife crisis. Lack of energy to do difficult work. Thus lots of blog posts and a bulking archive of exercises.

I hope to finish the writing of this book in 14 days from now.

Playing 1.e4: Caro-Kann, 1…e5 and Minor Lines by John Shaw

John is getting close to the end, but I will help him a bit with finishing the first book. As always, the name John Shaw on a book means that it is a team effort, with Nikos and I helping a lot (well, mainly Nikos of course!).

No one will believe this, but we will finish this book in March and maybe have it out in April.

Thinking Inside the Box

This will take a long time and be very challenging. I know quite a lot of what I want to say. Keep in mind that no one can know everything before they start writing, so actually it is freakish how much I really know about what will be in this book. I have written a few chapters already and I have a nice synopsis. A clear run will be all it takes. I have no idea if it will take three weeks, three months or three years to write it. The book should be excellent if I do not screw it up, because I have some good things to say. So, let us call that a 50-50 percent chance that it will be as good as Attacking Manual 1 and Positional Play!? If you hated those books, obviously you do not like my style, so then it is 100% it will be crap!

I have at some point promised to put up monthly updates to our publishing schedule. Well, things never work out exactly as we intend, but I think I am in reasonable time with this one.

There are a few things to point out. First off, Moranda’s Race up the Rankings has been cancelled. We might use the title another time – as well as the cover – but the content will not be the same. This is bad news. Basically the author did not feel he was able to go through the rewriting process because of career responsibilities. Chess literature will be poorer for its absence.

We have four books coming out on the 4th of February: 1.e4 vs. the Sicilian I, Kotronias on the King’s Indian, Mar del Plata 1 & Mar del Plata 2 and Chess Structures – A Grandmaster Guide. We are very happy with these books and I hope you will be happy with them too.

Should you prefer your books on Forward Chess, you can buy now. In general we will release the books one week ahead of the paper books, if you buy them electronically. This might not be fair to those who prefer paper (as indeed John and I do), but Forward Chess is a new enterprise and we would like to see it do well, so those buying the books there will get this extra week’s access, when possible.

In that connection I can reveal that Kotronias on the King’s Indian – Fianchetto System will be available quite soon on Forward Chess at a reduced rate.

For those in the know, I can say that we are unable to control anything relating to the taxing of ebooks in France, Italy and Luxemburg. It will hit all of Europe soon enough and we are not able to control things, neither is Forward Chess. Apple and Google are not lightweight dance partners. They step on your toes and not only do they not say sorry, they see nothing wrong with it in the first place…

The following list is rather reliable.
Read more…

Today, January 28th, is the day four new Quality Chess books are available on Forward Chess.

The new books are: Chess Structures – A Grandmaster Guide by Mauricio Flores Rios, Grandmaster Repertoire – 1.e4 vs The Sicilian I by Parimarjan Negi, and Kotronias on the King’s Indian Mar del Plata Volume I and Volume II.

The physical books have a publication date of a week from today – February 4th. This will probably be our standard schedule from now on – the ebooks arriving one week before the physical books. It makes sense to me, as you can zap an ebook around the world faster than a paper one. And ebooks don’t cause the sort of problems our distributor in Poland faced today when several very heavy pallets of books arrived on a truck, but with no hydraulic lift to unload them. They managed, somehow.