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

After having worked for us as a freelancer for years, former World Team Champion in problem solving, GM Colin McNab has decided to join Quality Chess as a full time editor from December. With lots of projects on the way, we badly needed extra hands, and got not only this, but also the remarkable skills Colin posses.

Short term, this is what we are working on at the moment:

Attacking Manual 2 has received another honour: the Guardian newspaper, specifically GM Danny King and Ronan Bennett, selected the Attacking Manual 2 as their Book of the Year, ahead of rival works written by Kasparov, Seirawan and Watson. Of course, recently the English Chess Federation also selected Attacking Manuals 1 and 2 as their Books of the Year.

The Guardian judges wrote:

“Aagaard delivers opinionated and sometimes biting judgments, and more importantly, he has found some remarkable and original ideas that enrich our understanding of attacking play. This is a case where computer software has been put to good use to bring out the beauty in a game, but he is not a slave to the machine, going his own way when necessary. So congratulations to Aagaard and Quality Chess.”

The full column can be found at the Guardian website.

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: