Quality Chess Blog

Dear Quality Chess Reader,

Judit Polgar, author of How I Beat Fischer’s Record, achieved the remarkable feat of beating World Number 1, Magnus Carlsen. Judit won the battle but lost the war, as Magnus stormed back to win the UNAM chess festival in Mexico City. The pair will face each other again at the London Chess Classic which starts this Saturday. They are joined by an incredible field – Anand, Kramnik, Aronian, Nakamura, Adams, McShane and Jones.

GM Boris Avrukh’s Grandmaster Repertoire 11: Beating 1.d4 Sidelines has been received with extraordinary enthusiasm. It is too early for official reviews, so I will quote a blog comment from a happy customer: “I would like to say ‘Congrats’ to Boris, Jacob, John and Andrew and the rest of the QC staff for GM11, another home run!!!” The customer is always right; well at least this one is.

Our chess file (in pgn or pdf) contains a range of material, so I shall just mention a few highlights. Of course this includes Judit’s win over Magnus. It is always fun to see an author in action or our repertoires being tested. In four of the other games we have both at once – GM Sabino Brunello following the repertoires suggested by GM Lars Schandorff. Sabino often follows Lars (with White and Black) with great results. I think Sabino may even be unbeaten when playing as ‘Lars’.

Finally, Quality Chess would like to congratulate Jens Kristiansen of Denmark on his superb play and victory at the World Seniors Championship in Greece. The GM title is automatically awarded with the ‘Senior’ title, so this enables Jens to make a well-deserved step up from IM (a title he achieved in 1979). But what has this to do with Quality Chess? Well, Jacob recently became Denmark’s national coach. One weekend training session and he creates a World Champion! That would be the tabloid version, but in fact Jens could not attend the only training session there has been so far. So all credit to Jens himself. There is a serious lesson here – whatever your age, improvement is possible if you put in enough time and effort. Jacob tells me that Jens is undoubtedly stronger now, aged just over 60, than he ever was before.

Regards,
John Shaw
Chief Editor
Quality Chess

Cathy and I went to Budapest in the weekend for her to play Judit Polgar. There are some photos as Judit’s Facebook site and a small video online.

Judit’s Facebook site

Dear Quality Chess Reader,

Welcome to the late October (okay, maybe more November) Quality Chess Newsletter.

We have new books on the way. On November 9th we will publish Positional Play by GM Jacob Aagaard and Grandmaster Repertoire 11: Beating 1.d4 Sidelines by GM Boris Avrukh. Both titles clearly tell the story of the contents.

Positional Play is the second volume of Jacob’s Grandmaster Preparation series. As with all the best instructive chess books, the reader cannot be a passive ‘consumer’ – it is essential to get involved and solve the exercises. If you put in the effort, you will be rewarded.

Grandmaster Repertoire 11: Beating 1.d4 Sidelines is a black repertoire after 1.d4 against White’s sidelines (this generally means most moves except 2.c4). GM Boris Avrukh covers almost every non-standard opening line at White’s disposal after both 1.d4 d5 and 1.d4 Nf6. Where applicable, Avrukh covers each white system after both 2…e6 and 2…g6, making this book suitable for fans of many openings, including the Nimzo-Indian, King’s Indian and Grünfeld defences.

We are also distributing to chess shops in Europe books that were published by Mongoose Press. Three new examples are: The Russian Endgame Handbook by Ilya Rabinovich, Thinking With Chess: Teaching Children Ages 5-14 by Alexey W. Root, and Amateur to IM: Proven Ideas and Training Methods by Jonathan Hawkins. I have not seen these books yet, so I will not say more, other than that English IM Hawkins is an impressive player with 2 GM norms and a 2500+ rating. If the publisher had waited a month or two, I suspect the title would be ‘Amateur to GM’.

Our chess file this month (pgn and pdf) concentrates on three openings – the Grünfeld, King’s Indian and the Slav. In the first two, we cover a couple of rare lines not mentioned in Lars Schandorff’s recent book Playing 1.d4 – The Indian Defences. In the Slav, Nikos Ntirlis reveals the story of a black gambit he developed after 1.d4 d5 2.c4 c6 3.Nc3 Nf6 4.e3. We have dubbed the line The Glasgow Kiss because Nikos’s early analysis was done in our fine city.

Regards,
John Shaw
Chief Editor
Quality Chess

Finally I dare the return to the most dangerous and difficult activity in my life – the inaccurate and fraudulent prediction of when we might be able to put some Quality Chess books your way…

I will leave this one to speak for itself. All I want to add is that we always appreciate the feedback.

We do our best to check our books for mistakes; even painstakenly so. In version 34 of the proofread version of Positional Play there were no big errors. In the print version (35) there was one. Sympathy is appreciated; abuse unnecessary, I feel bad enough already, even if this time it was not my fault!