Quality Chess Blog

Quality Chess is pleased to host a fourteen-hour training seminar over four days with probably the most renowned theoretician in the world. GM Boris Avrukh has worked with Gelfand, Kramnik and Caruana and is currently the trainer of the Israeli national team.

The sessions will be divided into two themes: the opening and the middlegame.
Thursday the 5th 19-22: Preparation at Grandmaster level
Friday the 6th 19-22: Developments in Avrukh’s 1.d4 repertoire
Saturday the 7th 14-18: Prophylactic Play
Sunday the 8th 12-16: Aggressive Play

Venue: Quality Chess office, Central Chambers, 93 Hope Street, Suite 45 (Mezzanine floor). Entrance next to Caffe Nero, opposite Glasgow Central Station.

Price: £120 for all four days. 50% discount for juniors and those living outside Scotland who travel here to attend. £60 for a single day attendance. If we have more than 20 full paying customers (or equivalent income) every participant will get a free copy of a Quality Chess book. Every participant will receive a 25% discount on QC books bought during the lectures.

Payment method: To reserve your place, please send a cheque made out to Jacob Aagaard to 20 Balvie Road, Glasgow, G62 7TA, UK. Please also confirm via e-mail to jacob@qualitychess.co.uk.

Born in 1978 in Kazakhstan, Boris started playing chess at the age of 6. His first big win was the Soviet u-12 Championship (beating among others Sergey Movsesian). Later the same year he won the u-12 World Championship. In 1991 he won silver in the u-14 European Championship. In 1995 his family moved to the famous chess city of Beer-Sheva in Israel, where Boris received a lot of support from the director of the Beer-Sheva Chess Club, Ilyau Levant. From 1995-2000 Boris worked with Grandmasters Mark Tseitlin and Alexander Huzman (Gelfand’s coach for many years). The work bore fruit and in 1998 he became a grandmaster.

Boris’s debut as a chess writer was Grandmaster Repertoire 1 – 1.d4 Volume One in 2008 and he was immediately hailed as one of the world’s top chess theorists. The book’s impact on top level and amateur chess has been exceptional and also brought great success to Quality Chess. In 2010 Boris repeated this success with the second part of his repertoire: Grandmaster Repertoire 2 – 1.d4 Volume Two. In June his new book, Grandmaster Repertoire 8 – The Grunfeld Defence will be published. All of these books are published by Quality Chess.
From 1998 to 2009 Boris played for the Israeli national team. His success as an author, and subsequent training and lecturing jobs, meant that he was not selected for the 2010 Olympiad due to the principle that only full-time players should be in the team, although he was clearly strong enough. The national coach decided Boris’s abilities were better used as a second and he now works for the Israeli national team in that capacity.

We are sitting four people in the office far beyond our normal time of departure, fighting to get Karpov’s Strategic Wins 2 – The Prime Years away to the printer this evening. The scheduled publication date of the 29th of April remains realistic. The first volume has already been printed, so there are no issues there.

At the same time we have just agreed a four day seminar in Glasgow from the 5th to the 8th of May with Grandmaster Boris Avrukh. He will lecture on issues from the opening and middlegame – ‘but tell them, no endgames!’.

The price for participating will be 120 pounds for all four days, with a discount of 50% for everyone wanting to come from outside Scotland to follow the lectures. If we have more than 20 full price paying participants, a copy of any of Boris’ four books (including Experts on the Anti-Sicilian, shipping to stores today, where Boris wrote a small chapter) will be given to each participant. Those wanting the Grunfeld book will have to wait until it is released on the 3rd of June (hopefully).

A more detailed announcement will follow.

Sean Marsh, writing at The Week in Chess, selected his best books of last year in Off the Shelf – The Best of 2010. As the screenshot below shows, we can be happy that Jacob’s Attacking Manuals 1 and 2 both made the list. Also the bonus of a new spelling of Jacob’s surname.

The full review of the Attacking Manuals says good things such as “They can rightly be considered as the flagships of the Quality Chess productions.”

We are estimating that Grandmaster Repertoire 8 – The Grunfeld Defence by Boris Avrukh will be available at the 3rd of June. Those who are eager to take up the Grunfeld before then, are recommended to look out for Delchev’s book for Chess Stars, which should be available in 2-3 weeks. We expect to have Vassilios Kotronias beautiful middlegame book The Grandmaster Battle Manual ready for the 3rd as well.

As something new, we will try to get the excerpts to you a bit early, even though they will not have a reliable contents page at this early stage.

On top of this we have made an agreement with Boris that he will work on a GM Repertoire book on 1.d4 deviations. This means a repertoire for Black after 1.d4 not followed by c2-c4 – be it for Grunfeld/KID players, Nimzo or Queen’s Gambit players. We hope to be able to include this book in our production for the end of the year, or early 2012.

Now I am off to send off the contract.

With all 440 pages uploaded, we have managed to get a publication date from the printer confirmed, as well as to speculate about the upcoming publication dates. The following titles might not be all the titles we will publish in 2011, but we hope to publish them all in 2011. If that makes any sense.

Sending a book of to the printer happens on a Friday night one time in three. Outside it is getting dark and dangerous, while we proofread the 440 pages a final time – undoubtedly missing something important. At the end of all books, we hate them. Or rather, we just want to go home…

It seems the book will be out on the 12th April in some countries, and a few days later in others. We will start sending websales on the 11th.

In these times where Saif Gaddafi claims to have paid for half of Sarkozy’s election campaign, where the Danish Minister of Defence says she had not considered that, when asked what would happen if Lybia would retaliate against Danish ships in the Mediterranean once in war, also Quality Chess has suffered hostility against our brand. This afternoon, we found the following evil note on our door:

We are outraged! We assure our readers that this is absolutely untrue! Our draughts are at least decent…

John says I have to go back to Experts on the Anti-Sicilian now :-(. Seems it should be available to ship to shops on the 8th together with Chess Lessons…

After a tough fight, Boris Avrukh’s Grandmaster Repertoire 2 won the public vote for the ChessPublishing Book of the Year prize. Congratulations to Boris and thanks to all those who voted.

Last year the first volume of Mihail Marin’s 1.c4 GM Repertoire won this prize, so ChessPublishing regulars clearly have excellent taste. Next year we shall attempt to three-peat.