Quality Chess Blog

The pgn file can be downloaded here.

We successfully uploaded three books to the printer, they are all for sale in the webshop:

Luther’s Chess Reformation

Key Concepts of Gambit Play

Playing the Ragozin

They will all be out on the 21st December, unless something goes wrong. We really wanted them out for the New Year tournaments and hope people will reward our effort by buying them. John is out cold btw. and have taken two days off to sleep…

We have also put Grandmaster Repertoire – The Nimzo-Indian for sale, although it is not uploaded and do not have a publication date.  We could not manage all four books for the 21st sadly, but we will get this done pretty soon and go from there. We will most likely publish it on its own, something we rarely do. My guess is that we will get it out in January, but no promises.

I will finish the formatting of the World Championship Quiz and put in the answers as they look so far. Hopefully today.

John, Nikos and I are working hard on Playing 1.e4. I think it will be out early in the spring.

I also put up a poll with two days. We will get back to having weekly polls. Suggestions to questions would be nice.

The Vlog will be recorded today. We will make a habit of posting them on Thursdays, I think.

The PGN file can be downloaded here.

Hi guys,

If we were to get books out for the 21st December (a bit shaky, snow in Poland could cause delays…), we would have to upload the final files to our printer this Friday. We decided, reviewing the progress last week, that this cannot happen with all four books. Key Concepts of Gambit Play has already been uploaded. Luther’s Chess Reformation will be uploaded in 1-2 days. Finally, we are working hard, all of us, to get Playing the Ragozin finished for Friday. We will make it, but decided that we were not 100% happy with pushing Grandmaster Repertoire – The Nimzo-Indian out the door this week too.

A) It felt as if we were working ourselves too hard. Mistakes come from that.

B) We felt that there were places where we wanted Michael to add a bit more explanation. The analysis are excellent and no one will be disappointed with that, we just felt that the human side of the book could do with a little more attention as well.

So we decided to push this book into January.

We will do other books next year too, of course. Lot’s of other books. But that will be for another day.

Magnus Carlsen’s main second is Peter Heine Nielsen. Peter has a quirky sense of humour. In 2010 when he was Anand’s chief second against Topalov, Anand played the same line in the Slav Kramnik had done in the 2006 match. A typical PHN joke as far as I am concerned.
Carlsen and PHN get along really well, from what I have heard. And the idea to play the Trumpowski can have arisen from either of them. But it is certainly a conscious joke that then evolved to a real choice…

The quiz has been closed. I will put up a link to the excel sheet once I have edited it.

We are working on the technical aspects of making this better. Hopefully we managed once again. This time we are going through the forthcoming book Key Concepts of Gambit Play and offering an exercise from the Greek rapid Championship. The pgn file mentioned in the vlog is available here.

Nikos’ sound has improved. Has mine gotten worse? Judge for yourself.

Yet another top event, yet another chance to win a big pile of books. This time however, the prize will consist of books written by the late Mark Dvoretsky. You will not be disappointed.

The way to enter is to answer these 15 questions. We have tried to update our entry system this time around. Hope it works. Question 15 is first tie-breaker. If still a tie, question 14 is the second tie-breaker.

On question 8, please do not write, for example, 1.Na3 – write Na3.

Deadline is 1 hour before the first move in the first game on the 11th November.

The questions

All these questions relate to Read more…