Quality Chess Blog

We have sent to the printer Opening Simulator – King’s Indian Defence by Esben Lund and Andreas Skytte Hagen. You can read an excerpt here. We are predicting a publication date of the end of July or the first week of August – printing time can vary.

This is a new style of book for us. It’s an opening book. And it’s a puzzle book. The excerpt explains the idea. In fact, it’s a tricky book to represent in an excerpt, as the book also includes a long introduction (about 80 pages) about standard plans and ideas in the King’s Indian. But we did not include any of that Introduction in the excerpt as chopping a little out of a coherent whole did not work for us.

If you are familiar with Esben Lund’s previous books – most recently, Sharp Endgames and The Secret Life of Bad Bishops – you will know that a huge effort goes into research for his books. And if anything the addition of a co-author, Andreas Skytte Hagen, has allowed an even more ambitious book. So if the King’s Indian Defence interests you, for either colour, then have a look and see what you think.

We have been keeping our heads down, trying to finish books. And the results are on the way. I will say more tomorrow, but for today we have an excerpt of The Nemesis – Geller’s Greatest Games.

This is a big book – 480 pages. And it’s the first time all Efim Geller’s annotations of his own games have been published in English. Some have been in English before, but Russian Chess House gathered many Russian-language sources, including two books and many magazines, to create the definitive complete collection. Our new book is an original English translation of that work.

As is our normal practice with non-opening books, we will release this book first in hardcover only. The predicted publication date is July 31. I hope you enjoy the book.

Boris Avrukh was recently interviewed by Chess Life writer John Hartmann. A webpage about the interview is here, while the direct Youtube link is here.

Topic discussed include Dynamic Systems – Grandmaster Repertoire 2B, and Boris’s other books, which engine Boris uses, and his plans for the future.

Thanks to John Hartmann for letting me know about this interview.