Quality Chess Blog

Just back from holiday in Legoland/Copenhagen. Time to write, write, write. So much to say, so bloody mute!

OK, regarding the publishing schedule. Sometimes things slide. Why? Can be a lot of things. A chapter having to be completely rewritten by the author? The chess being proved wrong in the book at a very late stage? An editor making poor choices? The author making poor choices and the editor deciding to leave them, then deciding to do the right thing and (re)fix them?

Many things like this happen.

We have one publication date to announce: Judit Polgar’s A GAME OF QUEENS will be out on the 5th of November. At the end of November, we will publish THE MODERN TIGER by Tiger Hillarp Persson, and Maizelis’ THE SOVIET CHESS PRIMER in our series of classics, as well as Mauricio Flores Rios’ CHESS STRUCTURES – A GRANDMASTER GUIDE. OK, maybe early December; the printer will decide and there is always a competition with Finnish and Swedish Christmas catalogues!

Finally, we are working hard on POSITIONAL DECISION MAKING IN CHESS by Boris Gelfand. He needs to return from three events before we can finish it. We are also working on the double volume on the MAR DEL PLATA variation by Vassilios Kotronias, Negi’s 2nd volume in his 1.e4 series and of course the never-ending struggle to get a full book out of John… We hope to have some of these out in January.

Should we go for Cover A

or Cover B?

We start with a preview from the Gelfand book, taken from a variation from Navara – Gelfand, Prague (1) 2006.

Black to Play and Win

In our weekly editorial meeting we have been debating the book with the working title Chess from Scratch at length almost every week. To cut to the pawn ending, basically we have wanted to squeeze a Soviet treasure into a title where it did not fully fit.

The title is not a description of the content of the book, but something we use to make people look at the book and find it interesting. Once you have people reading, hopefully they will forgive you anything. Obviously we care a lot about what is inside the book and not about the title, though we have to find good titles nonetheless…

On Friday I came to the meeting with a bombshell. I had finally realised that the box did not fit. We want to develop the ‘From Scratch’ series with a few more books, based among others on how much we love Chess Tactics from Scratch. But the Maizelis book does not fit. No matter how much we wanted it to fit.

So, we will publish it as The Soviet Chess Primer. It will be out in 5-6 weeks. We will have another book called Chess from Scratch quite soon as well. The author is someone a lot closer to home. Me.

The position at the start of the article Read more…

In Endgame Play I think I had a few interesting insights, besides a lot of training material, in an already well-explored part of the game. I think the most interesting chapter in the book was probably the chapter on Fortresses. I have after I wrote the book been made aware of some interesting articles written on fortresses, but in general it is a part of chess that has not been explored fully. For example, Dvoretsky’s Endgame Manual is not very strong in this area, despite being sensational (and essential) in many others.

In Endgame Play I came with a few thoughts about fortresses that I personally find interesting to explore further. I am not sure I will do it personally, nor that they are accurate. But I found them useful in understanding the positions I had collected for the book.

The first thought is to see fortresses not as something that holds or not, but as a defensive technique. For the practical player this makes most sense anyway.

The second is to see how fortresses usually fail. Of course there can be a break that makes the fortress collapse, but in general what I found was that zugzwang was a big part of the picture. Surprisingly a lot of fortresses fail to exactly this position.

White has just played Kd5 and Black loses due to zugzwang. Previously White has probably exchanged a piece on f7. Obviously you could add h-pawns without ruining anything. But once the pawn is back on g3, things are a bit more difficult as we shall see.

The third observation is one I will just leave hanging in the air, but which you will see the value of if you look at the book. It is the only of these that can be said to have a real novelty appeal to it. The idea is that most bishop endings are defended through the fortress technique. As said, I will just hang it out there for you to ponder. My observations say that it is so.

Read more…

Here is a list of some of our forthcoming books. As always, the dates are what we are aiming for and not an official publishing schedule.

Obviously we have some trade secrets in Quality Chess, but there are a few that are not secrets:

We print more books than we are likely to sell frequently. Starting the printer is costly; the cost of the last books printed is considerably less than the first books. Therefore it is better to overprint a bit than to print too few.

Some books are positive surprises; others are not. As you might guess, quality does not hurt, nor does it guarantee anything. Even if a book surprises positively, we end with extra books after the reprint.

Postage is getting more and more expensive. Actually, it is so expensive using the post office that it is cheaper to use UPS when the customer buys 3 books or more (over 2kg). Actually, it is the biggest expense when dealing with web orders. But UPS only charges marginally more when you add books; maybe 1€ per kg.

So, we are taking the consequences of this and will from now on be offering our EU web customers a free book on top of the free postage for orders of three books or more. And yes, should you order six books; we will of course put in two free books (and not of the same, of course).

I am not sure if we can automate this system easily; we are talking to our web designer at the moment, so that the customer is given a free choice of freebie. If not, we will probably do a “free book of the month” thing. Please be patient while we work this out.

For now, the free book of August and September is San Luis 2005, one of the best chess books of all time.

Round 3

A solid victory against Tunisia.

Davor Palo played fabulously one board one. His opponent very quickly got into a worse position and Davor then crunched the variations with something that looked like perfection. Positionally and tactically superb.

Read more…

Round 2

Davor Palo was super solid against Kasimdzhanov. A great draw.

Allan Stig Rasmussen was doing well against their other strong GM, Anton Filippov. Allan was supposed to rest today, but a technical error meant that he got to play. In a position where he was somewhat better he decided “to go all in” with a poor move (f2-f4), when he was briefly after lost. The reasoning was that things were not clear on the last two boards. Tomorrow Allan will get his rest. One should not forget that he played Politiken Cup just before this event and did great. A bit of rest will bring back the best in him, I am sure.

I lost in 92 moves. The game was wildly complicated and in move 21 I believed I had found a really nice defence, but a weird blindness meant that I overlooked gxf3 in response to …Rxf3. It will probably end up in one of my books, as the right move was fantastic! Instead I went into an opposite coloured bishop ending with a pawn down. It was holdable towards the end at least, but he circled the pieces well and suddenly I was lost. A good game, even though I lost.

Jakob Vang Glud was sailing in his game until he played too complacently. Instead of a big advantage, he was suddenly struggling a bit. He found a lot of good resources and outplayed his opponent a second time. Well done.

A sad loss of 2.5-1.5. Also a stupid loss. I missed a few things too many, but I guess this is why I am only 2525. I am old and I don’t do the work needed to be better than this (nor do I intend to!).

Otherwise we are enjoying ourselves here. Nikos and I are watching True Detective, which is very weird and I am reading I am Pilgrim by Terry Hayes, which is rather violent, but in a nice conventional laid back manner. Very enjoyable so far.