Before anyone says anything: This is not all the books we ever want to publish or even this year. This is just the ones I feel most confident about telling you about (as regular readers of this blog will know, we do change our minds, make other plans or simple get bogged down for a while in a difficult project).
Anyway, this is what I am hoping the immediate future will look like. Again with the caveat that not all manuscripts have been handed in, in their final form and some things still have to be written.
Peter Romanovsky |
Soviet Middlegame Technique |
28 February |
Marian Petrov |
GM Repertoire 12 – Modern Benoni |
28 February |
John Shaw |
The King’s Gambit |
21 March |
Jacob Aagaard |
Grandmaster Preparation – Strategic Play |
21 March |
Ntirlis/Aagaard |
Playing the French |
April |
Danny Gormally |
Mating the Castled King |
April |
John Shaw |
Playing 1.e4 – A Grandmaster Guide – Sicilian & French |
April/May |
Vassilios Kotronias |
Grandmaster Repertoire X1 – Kotronias on the King’s Indian – g3 Systems |
April/May |
Ftacnik (Aagaard) |
GM6a – Beating the Anti-Sicilians |
May |
John Shaw |
Playing 1.e4 – A Grandmaster Guide – Caro-Kann, 1…e5 & Minor Lines |
June |
Emanuel Berg |
Grandmaster Repertoire x1 – The French Defence Winawer |
June |
Jacob Aagaard |
Grandmaster Preparation – Endgame Play |
June |
… but at least this one is Danish! The winner of the ChessCafe.com Book of the Year award 2012 was definitely the right choice of the three nominees (I still like Judit’s book best, but that is just one opinion!).
Colin McNab for pointing out the most desperate of several mistakes of this advert in progress. (Let me get the excuses in early: very tired, not focused, early draft, the wind was blowing and Sabino has no advantage after the opening…)

So, John is our most desired author? In that case it is good the world did not end in 2012 and he can be allowed to impress us with his great insights…


And then of course there is the issue of Main lines. Do you like them or not – and what are they really?


Dear Quality Chess reader,
Happy New Year to all our chess friends.
At the end of this month we will publish four books.
Chess Evolution 3: Mastery concludes Artur Yusupov’s 9-book educational series. I cannot recommend this series strongly enough for any chess player who wishes to improve. Of course I am biased, but this is universally regarded as a magnificent series. FIDE agreed and awarded Artur the Boleslavsky prize for best instructional books.
Grandmaster Repertoire 13: The Open Spanish by Victor Mikhalevski supplies Black with a complete active repertoire after 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bb5 a6 4.Ba4 Nf6. The Israeli GM is a world-renowned opening expert, and has played the Open Spanish all his life, so he is the ideal author for this topic.
Attentive readers may spot we have jumped from GM 11 to GM 13. Not to worry – we will publish Grandmaster Repertoire 12: The Modern Benoni next month.
The final two books published on January 31st are the German editions of Jacob’s award-winning Attacking Manuals: Angriffslektionen 1 and Angriffslektionen 2.
Now from books to prizes: the ChessCafe Book of the Year prize is decided by an email vote to info@chesscafe.com by the public – voting is open now and ends on January 21st. There are three books in the final, one of which is Grandmaster Preparation: Calculation by Jacob Aagaard. I would never try to tell our readers which book to vote for – vote for your favourite!
The games section this month (pdf or pgn) contains, among other things, a few of my efforts from the Open section of December’s London Classic. They are offered as entertainment rather than for any educational value. I used to be better than this – honest. For any readers of Christian Bauer’s Play the Scandinavian more important is the correction of a chess typo.
Regards,
John Shaw
Chief Editor
Quality Chess
Not sure anyone are interested, but I am in the process of putting the exercises for Grandmaster Preparation – Strategic Play into Word. It will take to the end of the week. There will be a bit of extra organising of the remaining material as well as a bit of extra writing to do, but I am more than 90% there. It has been a very challenging book to write so far (the hardest bit should be over) and it will be very difficult chess wise. I appreciate that this book will not be for everybody, but it was a book I always wanted to write. And after all – it is Grandmaster Preparation, not amateur training :-).
The yearly vote on ChessCafe’s book of the year is now on. First round ends Monday, I think. I would like to encourage everyone to vote for whomever they desire to win. Winning is not greatly important to the bottom line, but it is to the authors! And to win when a lot of people has voted is clearly nicer than if just a few have voted. Thus, please go and have your say.
It is very rare that we make advertisement for other chess products here – maybe we never did? But I just wanted to say that to those who have children interested in chess (like myself), there is a new app available for Ipad (and later on for Iphone, but not yet as far as I understand).
Here are a few screen shots from the presentation video:


Recent Comments