Quality Chess Blog

It has been very interesting to read your top 3s in opening books over the last few days, as well as your explanations. If you did not add your personal top 3, please do so. Everyone is interested!

Now it is time to add your top 3 for non-opening books. Here is my two lists:

Non-Quality Chess

1. The Dvoretsky Endgame Manual (Dvoretsky)

2. Imagination in Chess (Gaprindashvili)

3. The Life and Games of Mikhail Tal

From Quality Chess

1. Attacking Manual 1+2 (sorry, this is my honest opinion)

2. Learn from the Legends

3. Chess Lessons

A bit surprising maybe that I don’t include San Luis 2005, which many (and probably correctly) put down as the best chess book ever. I agree with this in principle and beyond, the other books just fit better with my character.

The same can be said about Yusupov’s nine books. They are a monument and will last beyond the time we are here (I hope). But they don’t speak to me personally. In the same way that I personally like Jo Nesbo novels better than Julian Barnes, despite what the Booker committee might think :-).

We are publishing a few titles at the end of next week. We are also re-organising the company. John is taking over as Managing Director while I am becoming Creative Director (basically I make things up, but don’t have any real responsibilities) and Colin becomes Operational Manager (meaning he tells us when we have forgotten things) as well as staying an editor. I don’t think the rest of the world will notice, but to us it is quite a shift in focus, and most likely a very good one. The reason is quite simple: we need a change for many reasons, not the least because it will continue to make us more dynamic. And personally I am quite excited about working on the 1.e4 project as well as other ideas, rather than doing sales projections and talking to business contacts all over the world.

I will however still be active on the blog and answer questions, I just don’t have any weight to back my answers up with anymore :-). Here is the recent publishing schedule.

I am just about to go out the door to something as rare in my life as three days of holiday. I will obviously be online and workning while away, but still…

Quality Chess has joined forces with Anuk.doo (mainly Arkadij Naiditsch) to produce the periodical Chess Evolution. The first issue, September 2011, will be available in a week or so and is now available in our webshop. Soon we will also have subscription options. Hopefully I will be able to set them up while I am away, but if not, I will set them up at the end of next week.

We also have our own Chess Evolution series, and volume 1 will be finished from the printer at the end of next week. The same is the case for Black Gambits 1. Both books will be shipping from the 30th of September it looks like. We will send CE Sep a bit earlier to webshop customers, but probably not to shops. However, it will be in your local shop at the beginning of October. And if it is not – ask them to order it!

I finally got around to updating the coming soon section and adding seven books. We will add text to them throughout the day.

Because of the slow progress on, and the extensive material for, THE ALTERMAN GAMBIT GUIDE – BLACK GAMBITS, we have decided to publish the book in two volumes. We just don’t want the readers to wait around for the second volume for another nine months, while the book is finished. So, we will publish it in two, slimmer and cheaper, volumes. The first will be available quite soon.

Obviously this has happened before with us – leading one planned 128 page book from Mihail Marin to be split twice, after one chapter turned out to be 480 pages in book form (GM3) and other 150 (half of GM4). Recently this also happened with the Grunfeld books by Avrukh, which were simply too thick as one volume, and are quite comprehensive as two.

We don’t want this to be a bad habit, but certainly it has happened a few times…

As some of you will have noticed – our website has been somewhat broken – making it impossible to buy stuff. Not a great business model. Blame the webmaster and play ignorant is my tactic :-).

On the 30th we will move office from the current location just opposite Glasgow Central to five blocks up the road. The area is nicer, the place is bigger, the building nicer, the price lower and the company owning it gone into administration; causing all sorts of logistical problems!

Obviously we are going nuts – but everything should be on track now. Hope so – I just spent 1000 pounds in IKEA for new office furniture, including a big corner desk for yours truly.

John is working away on the King’s Gambit book. We are now optimistically putting a date on publication, although our confidence in it is low. Too low to put it in the webshop. We don’t think the King’s Gambit is the best way to play after 1.e4 e5, but these days anyone is struggling to find a good way to play. At least we have some interesting stuff to say; new concepts and a good deal of new ideas for both sides. We don’t promise an advantage – but we do promise publication!

The same is the case with the Tarrasch book. We are far – we have completed all analysis. I perform a final check in the writing phase, but that is about it. There are so many new ideas and concepts in this book, that we think it will move the theory forward by years. Chess is far from exhausted.

Finally, here is the wild guess about publication dates for the next few books:

These weeks we are finishing a few books, all ready about the same time. The following books are all but done:

Tactimania (pdf excerpt)

Grandmaster Battle Manual (pdf excerpt)

Grandmaster Repertoire 8 – The Grunfeld Defence (pdf excerpt)

Grossmeister Repertoire 5 – Die Englisch Eroffnungen (pdf excerpt)

My apologies for spelling mistakes and missing umlauts. I am simply to ill to care. I have gone to work the last three days with fever, to ensure that these books are coming out. And I am not the only one. I hear coughing all around me throughout the day. John claims his brain is melted, and is probably right on the money, as he claimed he had finished Chapter 6 of Grandmaster Battle Manual a week ago, but in reality had only typed in the page numbers for Chapter 5 twice!

A combination of such insidents means that this is a likely publishing schedule for the next few months.

This is not all the books that we have planned to publish, but it is the ones I feel confident about saying something definite about at the moment.