Quality Chess Blog

Last week’s poll question was ‘Did you follow the Women’s World Championship to some degree?’ There was a decent range of responses, but I think it fair to say the event did not have huge numbers of avid spectators. If you take the votes for ‘didn’t follow it at all’ and ‘I vaguely know who was in the semifinals and the final’ then you are already over 50% of the vote.

For this week’s poll we will check how your chess results have been going: Has your rating gone up or down since a year ago?  Many, perhaps most, of our books have ‘improving your chess’ as part of their point, so if you are reading this blog then there seems a decent chance you are interested in improving your chess results. So let’s see how you have been doing over the past year.

As you may have noticed, we have had some technical problems this week, since Monday morning. The blog was down for some time, but you will not know that we also had email issues. The problem was caused by a server failing, so it was not just Quality Chess affected, but whichever companies were using the same server. It all seems to be cured now.

I believe a couple of comments disappeared from the blog, so sorry if yours was one of those lost. Or if you emailed us earlier this week and we appear to be ignoring you, then please send again. But websale orders appear to have been received and processed fine.

Last week’s poll question was “How many books in the Yusupov series have you completed?” The result is clear: ‘zero’ was top followed by ‘1-3’ with the rest lagging a long way behind. Sure, a number of those who voted ‘zero’ will not own any of the books, but there are certainly many who have bought the books but not gotten around to working through them yet. So the Yusupov Challenge is much needed.

This week’s poll question is: “Did you follow the Women’s World Championship to some degree?” This is a follow-up question to last month’s “Will you be following the Women’s World Championship live?” when the main answer was ‘no’. But maybe a few of the dramatic incidents caught your attention and encouraged you to follow the action? Or maybe you prefer to check out the games after they are finished, rather than follow it live. There are so many ways to follow a chess event these days, it is almost impossible to make a good guess about the size of the audience.

We are continuing our special offer – if you buy three books or more and live in the normal European Union zone (as defined by UPS – for example, they exclude some islands and remote areas) we will send you an extra book free.

Please note that if you buy a Special Offer and are in the EU zone, we will add one free book. For example, the Yusupov Special Offer is 9 hardbacks for the price of 7. So if a European buys that, we send the 9 Yusupov hardbacks, plus one free extra book.

The previous default option on the free book was Tactimania. For March we will switch the default option to CHAMPIONS OF THE NEW MILLENNIUM by Ftacnik, Kopec and Browne. But if you already have that book, or would prefer a different free book, then send us an email to salesgroup@qualitychess.co.uk with your order, asking to have it replaced with one of the following titles:

QUALITY CHESS PUZZLE BOOK
CARLSEN’S ASSAULT ON THE THRONE
POSITIONAL CHESS SACRIFICES
GRANDMASTER VERSUS AMATEUR
GRANDMASTER BATTLE MANUAL
REGGIO EMILIA 2007/2008
THE ALTERMAN GAMBIT GUIDE – WHITE GAMBITS
THE ALTERMAN GAMBIT GUIDE – BLACK GAMBITS VOLUME 1
THE ALTERMAN GAMBIT GUIDE – BLACK GAMBITS VOLUME 2
SAN LUIS 2005
TACTIMANIA
ATTACKING THE SPANISH
CUTTING EDGE 1: THE OPEN SICILIAN
CUTTING EDGE 2: SICILIAN NAJDORF 6.Be3

Last week’s poll question was “How many books in the Yusupov series do you own?” Top answer was ‘zero’ but next was ’10’. I find that hugely encouraging. My interpretation is that if you read one Yusupov book, you may be impressed enough to want to get all of them.

Continuing the current Yusupov theme of the blog, in a comment Steve suggested this week’s question: “How many books in the Yusupov series have you completed?”

Obviously giving a simple numerical answer does not tell the whole story, as some of you own none, some own them all. So saying you have read “zero” means very different things for different people. But I am still interested enough in the raw numbers, especially in how many have read them all. And we hope that this number will increase due to the Yusupov Challenge.

I have personally taken up a challenge after reading an interesting article. It is my goal to read 100 books this year. 50 novels and 50 non-fiction books. I used to be an avid reader, but lately I have been caught up in too many things and maybe watched a few too many TV-shows on Netflix. Every second novel must be what we call a “serious” novel. At least!

In that connection, I propose a reading challenge for those who wants to improve their chess, but have never really gotten around to it. The Yusupov challenge.

Artur Yusupov has written 10 volumes in his series of training material for those starting at 1200-1800, wanting to get to 2200+. They cover more or less everything and received the first ever Boleslavsky medal from FIDE, when they started handing them out. And not without competition. Kasparov was in second place and Dvoretsky in third.

Your goal should be to read one book per month. There are 25 chapters in each book, making it a total of 250 chapters. They take maybe 10-20 minutes to read, after which there are 12 exercises, which should take you 20-40 minutes to go through. Some of you might want to spend more time per chapter, but the point stands. You can do six of them a week and make it easily. In a year, you will have learned an immense amount about chess.

Which order you should read the books in

When we acquired the books, we originally only planned to publish one from each series. We all make mistakes. For this reason, the order which the books are intended to be read is not entirely obvious. The order is:

Build up Your Chess 1, Boost Your Chess 1, Chess Evolution 1 – the orange books (Fundamentals series)

Build up Your Chess 2, Boost Your Chess 2, Chess Evolution 2 – the blue books (Beyond the Basics series)

Build up Your Chess 3, Boost Your Chess 3, Chess Evolution 3 – the green books (Mastery series)

The newest book, Revision & Exam 1 should probably be read last.

So, the order to which I suggest you read the books is:

Spring – The Fundamentals series

March: Build up Your Chess 1

Boost Your Chess 1

Chess Evolution 1

Summer – Beyond the Basics series

Build up Your Chess 2

Boost Your Chess 2

Chess Evolution 2

Autumn – Mastery series

Build up Your Chess 3

Boost Your Chess 3

Chess Evolution 3

Winter – Revision time

Revision & Exam 1

If you are up for it, sign up below.

In this video Jacob shows some tragicomedies from the recent Women’s World Championship and Nikos challenges the readers to calculate deeply and solve an endgame position.

The pgn file can be downloaded here.

Last week’s poll question was: ‘Where are you?’ I offered so many options that an image big enough to make all the results readable would break the internet, so below are just the edited highlights.

Rest of Europe (196 votes, 40%)
North America (72 votes, 14%)
British Isles (61 votes, 12%)
Rest of Asia (57 votes, 11%)
India (49 votes, 10%)

‘Rest of Europe’ was our big winner, which reminds me of an old joke that claims a British newspaper once published a headline: “Fog in English Channel – Continent isolated”. Anyway, we at Quality Chess are very much pro-European, but since we don’t deal with politics on this chess blog, please don’t interpret that as a comment about Brexit.

We also have good numbers here from North America, India and Asia in general. Everyone is welcome, even those from the neglected Caribbean.

In a recent blog post we saw the views of GM Adhiban Baskaran on the Yusupov series. There were nine books in the original series, and then Revision & Exam 1 with more to come we hope. So for this week the poll question is: How many books in the Yusupov series do you own?