Quality Chess Blog

Hi guys, I wanted to give two solid dates for you and one shaky. Anyway, just an update on various things.

But first off, if you are a member of The Chess Book Collectors group on Facebook, please vote on your favourite chess cover of 2019. It is a little thing to do to recognise the people who put in a lot of time trying to please your aesthetic sensibilities. We do not care if you vote for one of our books or a book from another publisher. But we do ask you to vote.

On the 15th July we will have multiple publications. First of all, we will have four books released in paperback, The Anand Files, Soviet Outcast, Small Steps 2 Success and The Nemesis.

Secondly, we have three new books coming: Playing the Stonewall Dutch, Playing the Petroff and Think Like a Machine.

As usual, we will be publishing the opening books in both paperback and hardcover, while the middlegame book will be published in hardcover and in paperback in half a year or more. This system is part of keeping your local chess specialist in business. The books do eventually become available on Amazon, we need those sales too stay in business, but remember that without the 50-100 chess specialists, the whole business of chess literature would seize to exist.

Further down the line, we have two volumes of The Italian Renaissance coming on August 12th, written by the strong Ukrainian GM Martyn Kravtsiv.

On the 16th September, we will release volume 3 and 4 in the Boris Gelfand Decision Making series. These will be the announced Technical Decision Making in Chess and a companion volume called Decision Making in Heavy Piece Endings, which will focus on positions with rooks and queens only.

We are also working on other books, such as the two Dutch Leningrad books by Marin, volume 5 of the Negi-series on 1.e4, the From Scratch series and of course my bloated project, A Matter of Technique, which is not an endgame book…

Saturday I made a bad mistake. While packing up web orders, I sent out the final copy of my first book for Quality Chess Practical Chess Defence, which is now not available through the website. Shops will still have it, but we are out. At the moment we are not reprinting. If I in 1-2 years look at it again, I would make an entirely new version, but at the moment I am busy with a lot of other things. The mistake is that I did not write a note to the buyer. I am sorry!

Also, there is a mistake that I know of in the book. Exercise 170 is to win, not to draw!

This position is also in Quality Chess Puzzle Book, the book John Shaw wrote based on the first of my collections of training material for Boris Gelfand.

About the webshop

We are open for business. But things are going slowly for another week still. I am doing the packing and posting personally. I go to the post office 2-3 times per week to send out the parcels. I am going in a moment, actually. There were too many to pack Saturday! I first had to go to the office to pick up the books…

Be patient. The books will come, just a bit slower than usual.

Also remember that the postal workers are also adjusting and that bringing out the latest book on the Grunfeld is not worth dying for, even if people are dying to read it.