Quality Chess Blog

After having worked for us as a freelancer for years, former World Team Champion in problem solving, GM Colin McNab has decided to join Quality Chess as a full time editor from December. With lots of projects on the way, we badly needed extra hands, and got not only this, but also the remarkable skills Colin posses.

Short term, this is what we are working on at the moment:

Attacking Manual 2 has received another honour: the Guardian newspaper, specifically GM Danny King and Ronan Bennett, selected the Attacking Manual 2 as their Book of the Year, ahead of rival works written by Kasparov, Seirawan and Watson. Of course, recently the English Chess Federation also selected Attacking Manuals 1 and 2 as their Books of the Year.

The Guardian judges wrote:

“Aagaard delivers opinionated and sometimes biting judgments, and more importantly, he has found some remarkable and original ideas that enrich our understanding of attacking play. This is a case where computer software has been put to good use to bring out the beauty in a game, but he is not a slave to the machine, going his own way when necessary. So congratulations to Aagaard and Quality Chess.”

The full column can be found at the Guardian website.

Quality Chess has joined the arms race and purchased a super computer, kindly assembled by Phil Harris. Our new machine is running at many times the speed of our quad core standard machines and needs a water cooling system to not overheat. Hopefully this will increase the level of our analysis for the future.

I wanted to show you a photo of how the water cooling looks inside, but it was quite low quality and I can’t be bothered to open it again. Sorry.

Update: Photo of the innards of the fancy new computer:

A business announcement: from January 1st we intend to increase our shipping charges to EU countries. This will be our first increase since 2004 and will not fully cover the real increase in costs since then, so we hope customers will not be too disappointed.

Our old rules were:

Shipping to European Union countries

• 3 Euros for 1 book
• 6 Euros for two books
• Free Shipping if you order 3 or more books

We are changing this to:

Shipping to European Union countries

• 5 Euros for 1 book
• 8 Euros for two books
• Free Shipping if you order 3 or more books

Plus the usual disclaimer:

“Note: It is the customer’s responsibility to provide a full and correct address, e-mail and phone number. Any problems arising from these details being incorrect is not the responsibility of Quality Chess UK Ltd “

So the only change is an increase of 2 Euros on the first book. There are two main reasons for this: increasing postage charges in general and the fact that our books are getting heavier. The shipping charges the customer pays will of course still be much lower than our real costs of posting the books.

Orders of 3 books or more (and sometimes orders of just 2 books) will be sent by UPS. If the customer is out when UPS calls, it is the customer’s responsibility to contact UPS. Sorry, we can’t do it for you.

Dear Quality Chess Reader,

Andrew Greet and I have just returned from the Olympiad in Khanty-Mansiysk, Siberia. Andrew was non-playing captain of the English Women’s team, who performed above expectations. I was Board 3 for the Scottish team in the Open section; we finished slightly below our seeding, despite beating all the teams we were meant to beat and only losing to our betters.

Back to the books: the final two volumes of Mihail Marin’s 1.c4 repertoire: Grandmaster Repertoire 4 and Grandmaster Repertoire 5 are being printed now and, if you live in Europe, October 15 is a good prediction of when you will be able to read them.

GM Christian Bauer’s Play the Scandinavian will also be available at the same time. Please note that this book concentrates on 1.e4 d5 2.exd5 Qxd5 3.Nc3 Qa5; fans of the quirky 3…Qd6 will have to look elsewhere.

Excerpts are available for all three books at the following links: Grandmaster Repertoire 4, Grandmaster Repertoire 5 and Play the Scandinavian.

Attached is a bumper collection of chess analysis: including various puzzles, a couple of Avrukh-crunching Grunfelds, a non-boring Exchange Slav and a friendly but spirited analytical debate between Jacob and Anish Giri. This is available in either ChessBase or pdf format.

Regards,

John Shaw

Chief Editor

Quality Chess

During the World Championship match between Topalov and Anand I annotated a game for Chess Today. As my deadline was later than the quickly published annotations on ChessBase.com by GM Anish Giri, it would have been unnatural not to relate to these. So, in the two hours at my disposal, I tried to form a personal opinion based on his annotations, and on things I noticed individually. Now, half a year later, Giri has published an open letter for Yearbook 96, where he says I am wrong in almost everything. His lines are very interesting, but not completely accurate.

I will go into details about his claims in our next newsletter, likely to come out in a week or so, when John and Andrew are back and rested, but for now I want to point to a few moments for those that have seen the article.

Line 1 After 18.Nxf5 has a nice improvement with 18…Qf6, but his claim later that I have to show variations to disagree with his reading of a computer evaluation after 18…Qc5 19.axb5 cxb5 20.Qd4 Qc7. I could say 21.Bh3! and the computer is supporting White again. This way we could use a decade to get to the truth, making two full moves a year… I have done some analysis and I cannot see that Black is ever equal. Besides, I think 18.exf5 is maybe the better move.

Line 2 looks strange. What went wrong? What was I thinking? I have no idea.

Line 3 has a nice improvement on move 39. Long analysis often have mistakes. Probably I was too eager to find something that kept Black in the game.

Line 4 is interesting, as he says I am wrong overall, but states that I did improve on his analysis in the details. However, his 24.Qc3 line is not accurate.

In the “final” position after 24…Qd7 25.Rd4 e5 26.Nxh6+ gxh6 27.R4xd3 Nxd3 28.Rxd3 White does have the advantage, but after some analytical work I found a sort of defence for Black with 28…Rfd8 29.Qxe5 Qe6 30.Qf4 f6!?. That the position is winning is not obvious, although it is better for White. But 24…Qd7 is just a howler. 25.Rxd3 leads to a winning advantage if you look deep enough. So, Black has to try 24…Rab8!?, when there are some very complicated variations, clearly favouring White. If this is better than a pawn up in an ending is not obvious to me.

last night at the gym I caused a bit of a stir. I returned to my locker and found that once I unlocked it, there was nothing inside. I call the manager and he started checking all the locks to see if anyone by chance had the same code. 10 minutes later we were back where we started. I asked, what do you usually do in this situation? Check everything before we believe the worst, he replied. As for example checking the empty… Oops, is that your stuff? So, I had locked the empty locker next to my stuff. And it was all there, passport, money, blackberry, cards, secret novelties in the Sicilian, dirty books where the king is stripped bare. Surely you were mortified, a friend asked later. No, not at all. I burst out laughing. We always say, one day we will laugh at this. I always try to make sure that this one day is today…

I am proud to have won the 2010 ECF Book of the Year award for Attacking Manual 1 – 2nd edition and Attacking Manual 2. The reason why I did not originally write this project for Everyman despite a very nice offer, but set up Quality Chess instead, was that I wanted it to be perfect – and that I wanted to win this prize. This is the biggest achievement of my career by far.

English Chess Federation

BOOK of the YEAR 2010

The judges this year were faced with a particularly difficult choice as all the four books listed had considerable, but differing merits. The choice finally fell on a two volume work which had taken the author no less than eight years to write.

The book is Attacking Chess Volumes 1 and 2 by Jacob Aagaard, published by Quality Chess at £23.99 each.  These constitute a substantial work totalling 720 pages in all, excellently laid out and printed. The volumes are written in a lively manner, which keeps the reader entertained as well as interested.

The genesis of the book is found in the introduction to volume 1. Aagaard felt that the role of intuition had been undervalued in chess writing. Good players not only calculate but also have a feeling for what might be possible in a given position, which can be described as intuition. Aagaard also felt that there was a shortage of good books on attacking play –by which he means attacking the King. There are many excellent titles on combinations, but Aagaard is looking for the conditions when an attack may be possible (King in the middle is an obvious example) and how that attack may be prepared and prosecuted. In other words Aagaard is trying to develop the reader’s attacking intuition.

Volume 2 is, in the words of the author “what to do when the attack is up and running”.

Whilst doing this, Aagaard introduces new concepts and ideas into the text. To help in this process he gives preview diagrams of the positions to be discussed, which the reader is invited to consider before reading on, a valuable learning tool.

The author has obtained the games and positions for both volumes from a wide range of contemporary sources, many of which were new to the judges. It is also clear that throughout Aagaard has provided fresh commentary and analysis. The reader can simply enjoy the many fascinating positions or study in depth, but either way there are many hours of pleasure to be found in these two books.

Aagaard has written a significant and original treatise on the fine art of attacking play and is a worthy winner of the Book of the Year 2010.

R B Edwards  J Farrand  D Friedgood 27th September 2010