Quality Chess Blog

We have run a few quizzes before, and they have been fun, so with the 2017 World Cup starting on Sunday in Georgia, let’s have another. I say it’s for fun, but there is a winner-takes-all prize.

Quality Chess will send a box of 20 books to your home. 10 of them chosen by you, 10 of them chosen by us. All you have to do is to predict some results in the World Cup. We will contact the winner once the World Cup is over and organize the shipment of the prize.

Hurdle Questions: To allow us to quickly reduce the number of emails to check, only participants who get the three initial questions right will proceed to the second round of scoring. The points scored in the first round will count in the second round (unless otherwise stated, a correct answer is worth one point).

A: What will the most common opening move be in Round 1 (excluding playoffs): 1.e4 or 1.d4 or neither?
B: Which English player will go further: Gawain Jones or David Howell? (if knocked out at same stage then which one has played more moves is the tiebreak)
C: Which opening will be more common in Round 3 (excluding playoffs)? Grunfeld or Caro-Kann or tie?

Main Competition Questions:

Read more…

Training Seminar in Edinburgh with Grandmaster and FIDE Senior Trainer Jacob Aagaard 6-8 October

On the first weekend of October there will be a three-day training seminar with Grandmaster Jacob Aagaard in Edinburgh Chess Club. The training weekend is organised in collaboration with Chess Scotland, offering free participation to the members of the national team participating in the European Team Championship in Crete in November.

The themes will be changing from day to day, with a focus on positional play, calculation and endgame technique. The sessions will be evenly balanced between lecturing and practical application.

The place of the training seminar is Edinburgh Chess Club, 1 Alva Street, in the centre of Edinburgh.

The timings are:

Friday 6th October         7pm – 10pm

Saturday 7th October      1pm – 5.30pm

Sunday 8th October        11am – 3.30pm

The cost of participation is £75. Please register by emailing ECCseminar2017@qualitychess.co.uk.

One thing that many people struggle with is solving puzzles on their own. It requires some discipline to get started and distractions can get you diverted. It is popular to meet up with friends and solve together. It makes it social and a bit competitive. But for most people, this is not an option. Their friends are far away and local players might have no ambition or be unsuitable for other reasons.

The idea I came up with years ago that worked really well, was to have group training on PlayChess (or it could be many other servers or even Whatsapp on your phone).

The way to do it is that one person has gathered positions in advance, preferably from a Quality Chess book of course, but other good exercise books have been published (I have been told).

He presents the first problem to the group.

When you have a solution, you say so.

When only one person is left, he gets an extra minute to find the solution, while the others prepare their solutions (but don’t press return).

When time’s up everyone gives their solutions.

Correct solutions get one point, mistakes get no points. The group decides if the solution is correct in disputes.

Next problem.

After a fixed amount of time, you have a winner.

This worked for a long time with a group I set up. I supplied them with the exercises, but since then these have been published in many books, so there are no excuses…

Our friend and my compatriot Steffen Slumstrup Nielsen won a composition tournament in front of the two modern giants of chess competition, Afek and Pervakov. On request, he has written a small report for our blog, which I have decided to attach in a PDF.

But I wanted to give the readers a chance to solve some of the studies on their own. First of all, here is Steffen’s study.

White to play and win

Read more…

Last week Colin McNab, long-time QC editor and proofreader, was in Dresden, Germany as part of the British team at the World Chess Solving Championships. The Polish team of Piorun, Murdzia and Mista proved too strong, but Britain took the silver medals – well done all. Full results here.

The photo below, by Franziska Iseli, shows Colin with his teammates Jonathan Mestel and John Nunn – all three are of course over-the-board Grandmasters.

Just a quick note on the best way to approach us on anything.

a) Write to us on the blog. In 99% of all cases, others will be interested in our answers as well and it is not private. There will be some exceptions, like sending us links not everyone should see or something like this. In that case:

b) email one of us. If you email all five of us, you will take time away from four people who would not reply that could be used working on books. If you email all of us, expect to be reprimanded harshly.

c) contact us privately on messenger Sunday evening with trivial questions. Guess what brought up this post! Please respect that when you send a message to one of us that will come up on our phone outside office hours, you are invading our privacy. Please don’t do it.

To sum up:

Almost everything should be put on the blog. We check everything and answer all serious questions. In rare cases, email one of us.

Congratulations to GM Gawain Jones who is the 2017 British Chess Champion. Gawain won a four-man playoff against GM Luke McShane, GM David Howell, and IM Craig Hanley after they all finished on 7/9.

Gawain wrote two excellent books on the Dragon for Quality Chess, and naturally we would like him to write more books for us, but so far he has been too busy playing chess and winning tournaments.

There will be an informal, combined rapid/blitz match taking place this Sunday 6th August in Glasgow, starting just after 3pm and finishing at roughly 6pm.

Six leading Scottish players (GM Jacob Aagaard, IM Andrew Greet, FM Alan Tate, FM Neil Berry, IM Steve Mannion and our newest FM and Scottish Champion, Murad Abdulla) will be taking on six strong GMs/IMs who are all here for a training camp hosted by Jacob.

Spectators are welcome to drop in, enjoy watching some entertaining chess, and have a few laughs. The venue is All Bar One at 56-72 St Vincent Street in Glasgow’s city centre, where we have been granted the use of the entire upstairs area.

The foreign players are GM Sam Shankland (US), GM Mads Andersen (DK), GM Swapnil Dhopade (IND), IM Johan Salomon (NOR), IM Tania Sachdev (IND) and IM Sam Collins (IRE).