Quality Chess Blog

Dear Quality Chess Reader,

If you live near London you will soon have the chance to attend lectures by two of our authors. Grandmasters Jacob Aagaard and Boris Avrukh will be giving talks at the London Chess Classic. Jacob’s will be on December 14; Boris’s date has yet to be confirmed. On the same day as his lecture, Jacob will be awarded the ECF Book of the Year Prize for Attacking Manuals 1 and 2.

We at Quality Chess are currently working mainly on four books: Boost Your Chess 3 by Artur Yusupov, Chess Lessons by Vladimir Popov, The Cutting Edge 2: The Sicilian Najdorf 1 by Milos Pavlovic and Experts on the anti-Sicilians edited by Jacob Aagaard and John Shaw.

Boost Your Chess 3 is the latest volume in GM Yusupov’s award-winning instructional series. The “3” in the title tells the reader this is at the Mastery level. Yusupov’s series increases in difficulty from The Fundamentals (1) to Beyond the Basics (2) and then finally Mastery.

In Chess Lessons, Vladimir Popov shares the chess wisdom he accumulated while coaching many promising juniors. In particular the book offers many lessons from the games of Popov’s two most celebrated pupils, the Kosintseva sisters. Tania and Nadia Kosintseva were recently in action as the top two seeds at the Russian Women’s Championship. At the following link you can read a sample chapter.

In The Cutting Edge 2: The Sicilian Najdorf 1 GM Milos Pavlovic analyses various state-of-the-art lines in the Sicilian Najdorf (with the exception 6.Bg5 which will be covered in the next Cutting Edge book).
 
Experts on the anti-Sicilian is written by a host of grandmasters (including Peter Heine Nielsen, Boris Avrukh, Christian Bauer, Matthieu Cornette, John Shaw, Jacob Aagaard, Milos Pavlovic and Tiger Hillarp Persson). The book covers various lines of the Sicilian where White avoids playing the Open Variation (2.Nf3 and 3.d4).

The chess file links below have various interesting pieces of analysis including GM Mihail Marin’s response to some questions about Grandmaster Repertoire 4 and Grandmaster Repertoire 5: the books which completed his 1.c4 repertoire. There is also plenty of original analysis by GM Jacob Aagaard that is relevant to several of our books. The chess files are available in pdf or ChessBase format.

Two of the books we published in the early years of Quality Chess were Tiger’s Modern by Tiger Hillarp Persson and The Benko Gambit by Jan Pinski. We ran out of copies of these two books so we are currently reprinting them. They will be available next week.

Regards,

John Shaw
Chief Editor
Quality Chess

Quality Chess has joined the arms race and purchased a super computer, kindly assembled by Phil Harris. Our new machine is running at many times the speed of our quad core standard machines and needs a water cooling system to not overheat. Hopefully this will increase the level of our analysis for the future.

I wanted to show you a photo of how the water cooling looks inside, but it was quite low quality and I can’t be bothered to open it again. Sorry.

Update: Photo of the innards of the fancy new computer:

Dear Quality Chess Reader,

Andrew Greet and I have just returned from the Olympiad in Khanty-Mansiysk, Siberia. Andrew was non-playing captain of the English Women’s team, who performed above expectations. I was Board 3 for the Scottish team in the Open section; we finished slightly below our seeding, despite beating all the teams we were meant to beat and only losing to our betters.

Back to the books: the final two volumes of Mihail Marin’s 1.c4 repertoire: Grandmaster Repertoire 4 and Grandmaster Repertoire 5 are being printed now and, if you live in Europe, October 15 is a good prediction of when you will be able to read them.

GM Christian Bauer’s Play the Scandinavian will also be available at the same time. Please note that this book concentrates on 1.e4 d5 2.exd5 Qxd5 3.Nc3 Qa5; fans of the quirky 3…Qd6 will have to look elsewhere.

Excerpts are available for all three books at the following links: Grandmaster Repertoire 4, Grandmaster Repertoire 5 and Play the Scandinavian.

Attached is a bumper collection of chess analysis: including various puzzles, a couple of Avrukh-crunching Grunfelds, a non-boring Exchange Slav and a friendly but spirited analytical debate between Jacob and Anish Giri. This is available in either ChessBase or pdf format.

Regards,

John Shaw

Chief Editor

Quality Chess

last night at the gym I caused a bit of a stir. I returned to my locker and found that once I unlocked it, there was nothing inside. I call the manager and he started checking all the locks to see if anyone by chance had the same code. 10 minutes later we were back where we started. I asked, what do you usually do in this situation? Check everything before we believe the worst, he replied. As for example checking the empty… Oops, is that your stuff? So, I had locked the empty locker next to my stuff. And it was all there, passport, money, blackberry, cards, secret novelties in the Sicilian, dirty books where the king is stripped bare. Surely you were mortified, a friend asked later. No, not at all. I burst out laughing. We always say, one day we will laugh at this. I always try to make sure that this one day is today…

Dear Quality Chess Reader,

We recently received encouragement from England: Champions of the New Millennium and Jacob’s Attacking Manual 1 and Attacking Manual 2 were placed on the shortlist for the ECF Book of the Year prize. These were the only books we put forward for the prize and the judges’ comments were flattering.

Publication News: Play the Scandinavian by GM Christian Bauer will be out in late September. The French Super-GM is a noted expert on the 1.e4 d5 2.exd5 Qxd5 3.Nc3 Qa5 lines on which his book concentrates.

GM Mihail Marin will soon complete his repertoire for White with 1.c4: Grandmaster Repertoire 4 and Grandmaster Repertoire 5 should be out in October.

GM Boris Avrukh’s Grandmaster Repertoire 2 will be available in a German translation in late September. A hardcover version of the English version is available on our website and soon also in shops in Europe, plus probably Chess4Less and ChessCafe in the USA.

We are continuing our new idea of including a ChessBase file with the newsletter. This time it includes:

An update and some comments on Ftacnik’s Grandmaster Repertoire 6

A few updates on Schandorff’s Grandmaster Repertoire 7 – mainly relating to small things lacking in the book.

A nice game Andrew lost at the British, but also a win where he used an Avrukh novelty (“I well and truly Avrukhed him,”; Andrew told me.)

This ChessBase file is also available as a pdf printout for those without ChessBase – the same goes for the first newsletter.

More will follow about Grandmaster Repertoire 6 in another newsletter in a few weeks.

Regards, John Shaw

Chief Editor,

Quality Chess

Dear Quality Chess Reader,

We have now published two new books. GM Repertoire 6: The Sicilian Defence by GM Lubomir Ftacnik and The Quality Chess Puzzle Book by GM John Shaw.

GM Repertoire 6: The Sicilian Defence provides a sharp, complete repertoire for Black after 1.e4 c5.

The Quality Chess Puzzle Book offers 735 challenging puzzles to entertain and instruct the reader.

An innovation for this newsletter is a link to a ChessBase file with 22 games annotated by the Quality Chess team. In this case mainly GM Jacob Aagaard with a couple of contributions by GM John Shaw.

Quality Chess proudly sponsors chess events from time to time. Previously we have sponsored a rapid event in Edinburgh, the 2009 Scottish Championship, an IM-tournament in Edinburgh 2009, as well as the best game prizes at the Politiken Cup in 2006, 2009 and the forthcoming 2010 edition. We also recently sponsored the best game prizes in the 2010 Danish and Swedish Championships. The first 9 games in the file are all winners of a daily best game prize from the Swedish event. We have inserted an automatic question here and there to test those who are interested. Please enable your “Training Function” in order to allow yourself to be tested. There is also a position from our recent title Soviet Chess Strategy that also has a very nice puzzle, and quite a hard one.

Naturally we take an interest in how the lines suggested in our books fare after publication. A few of the other games are relevant to our opening books. One high-level example was Leko – Le Quang Liem from the elite Dortmund tournament. Black won after following for 12 moves the line recommended by GM Lars Schandorff in GM Repertoire 7: The Caro-Kann

Regards, Chief Editor John Shaw

A few months ago a guy wrote to me asking if we were going to include 6.Bg5 Nbd7 7.f4 Qc7 8.Qf3 h6 9.Bh4 g5!? in GM6. We had no intention to do so, but a last moment change of hearts has meant that we do indeed include this topical line. Berg, Dominguez, Navara and Ivanchuk has all been happy to try it out (not all have been allowed), but it is mainly Bogner that has shown the way in practice. However, if the ‘inventor’ of this line sees this post, he is very welcome to e-mail me again, as I can’t find his last e-mail!

Dear Quality Chess Reader, 

Recently we have experimented by printing some of our books in hardback. It was a success both in the favourable feedback we received on our blog and in terms of the sales. In fact, the hardbacks disappeared so quickly that we at Quality Chess did not even get to keep a personal copy. For this and other reasons we are reprinting more hardback versions of Soviet Chess Strategy and GM Repertoire 7: The Caro-Kann. We hope they will be available in 3-4 weeks.   

GM Boris Alterman was on John Watson’s ICC Radio show Chess Talk. Boris talked about about his book The Alterman Gambit Guide – White Gambits which John Watson spoke about very favourably. A few quotes (from Jacob’s memory): "A great section on the Panov… Designed with the average player in mind. Can also be used by club players and other more experienced players… A very well produced book, typical of Quality Chess."  

The Quality Chess Puzzle Book and GM Repertoire 6 – The Sicilian Defence will both be out in early July. Some of our readers generously contributed to the puzzle book by sending in their best chess moments, which we used to create a chapter called Contributions from our Readers 

Regards, Quality Chess

www.qualitychess.co.uk

www.qualitychess.co.uk/blog

Publication Schedule (with predicted page numbers)

Lubomir Ftacnik    Grandmaster Repertoire 6 – The Sicilian Defence   July   356

John Shaw   Quality Chess Puzzle Book    July    256

Christian Bauer     Play the Scandinavian     July/August    320

Artur Yusupov    Boost your Chess 2    July/August    288

Mihail Marin    Grandmaster Repertoire 4 – The English Opening vol. 2    August   480 

Mihail Marin    Grandmaster Repertoire 5 – The English Opening vol. 3    August   320

Tibor Karolyi    Karpov’s Strategic Wins: Volume 1 – 1961-1985    September    360

Tibor Karolyi     Karpov’s Strategic Wins: Volume 2 – 1986-2009 September    360

John Shaw     The King’s Gambit      September/October    256