Woodpecker Wednesday – guest post by GM Axel Smith
Andrew Greet asked if I would mind answering questions appearing in the comments to his blog posts. However, I see that Andrew has already done that, while also sharing his own experience. Thanks! It’s also nice to see all the readers’ efforts. I hope you have enjoyed all the hours of solving. Just like many of you, I consider the boring part to be checking the solutions. But sometimes it has to be done.
As I am afraid to find silly mistakes, I usually don’t read anything I have written after it’s published. But this time a reader gave the book back to me, with marks to a lot of games. “White and Black have been confused in too many games,” he said. “It’s not possible that the world champions blundered that often.”
But the book is right in this case – these blunders really were played by the elite, even though some of them were in simuls and exhibitions. Doesn’t it feel good to excel over a world champion?
However, one real error was accidentally added during editing: diagrams 11 and 18 are similar, but with the wrong solution to the first. Given the time it took me to solve the replacement exercise (pdf), I guess I need to Woodpecker!
My wife is already on the way. She hasn’t played in two years, but after smelling the new book (always the most important thing to her) she started solving. With limited time available, she skipped the introduction, and several times she asked me questions that definitely are discussed in the book.
“Read the introduction!” was my constant answer. Read more…
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