Quality Chess Blog

When you have a number of entrants (128 in this case) competing in a knockout format, what kind of seeding/pairing system should be used?

The most common pairing system involves splitting the list in two, so that No.1 plays 65, 2 plays 66 and so on until 64 plays 128. This is seen as normal, although it’s slightly odd that the players ranked from places 60-68 (give or take) might only be separated by a few rating points, yet will have vastly differing chances of making it through the first round, depending on which side of the halfway line they happen to fall.

The actual system being employed at the World Cup involves the top seed playing the bottom seed in each round, i.e. No.1 vs. 128, 2 vs. 127, all the way up to 64 vs. 65. The main argument in favour of this system is that it gives the highest seeds the best chance of making it to the end – but does it stack the odds too heavily in their favour while making it too difficult for those players nearer the middle of the rankings?

This brings us to this week’s poll question: Is the World Cup pairing system fair?

Quality Chess will send a box of 20 books to your home, wherever in the world that may be. 10 of them chosen by you, 10 of them chosen by us. All you have to do is to predict some results in the World Cup. We will contact the winner once the World Cup is over and organize the shipment of the prize.

Hurdle Questions: In order for us to quickly reduce the number of emails to check, only participants who get the three initial questions right will proceed to the second round of scoring. The points scored here will count in the second round (unless otherwise stated, a correct answer is worth one point).

A: What will the most common opening move be in round 1 (excluding playoffs): 1.e4 or 1.d4 or neither?

B: Which of these home players will go further: Rauf Mamedov or Eltaj Safarli? (if knocked out at same stage then which one has played more moves is the tiebreak)

C: Which opening will be more common in round 3 (excluding playoffs)? Najdorf or Catalan or tie?

Main Competition Questions:

Read more…

This is a temporary post. We were talking about the upcoming World Cup and got a bit excited to be honest. So we decided to have a little competition. We are working on the questions at the moment. They will be available Tuesday morning at some point. The deadline for entry will be 1 hour before the start of the first round on Friday.

Look out for more details here tomorrow.

Do you know what you will be doing for the next six months? We do. The real question will be if we can do everything as fast as we want. For example: Boris Gelfand constantly gets all these annoying tournament invitations that distracts him from the book…

We do not really have dates for anything else than the Dragon books, published next, but I can give a few informal updates.

The next volume on 1.e4 vs the Sicilian is only a few weeks from going to the printer. It could theoretically be out late October. The Razuvaev book is far progressed as well. But most importantly, John has made great progress on the Playing 1.e4 books. I think the first one will be out in November and the second not long after. We considered publishing them together, but it did not really make a lot of sense to wait with one, while the other one is finalised. So, they will be out a few months apart.

Magnus Carlsen recently provoked a lot of discussion on the format of the World championship by giving his support to a knock-out system (see the ChessBase report here). What do you think is the best format for the World Championship?

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The results of last week’s poll gave a healthy majority in favour of Carlsen retaining World Number One status, and with no clear indication of who is most likely to challenge him.

With four other players now also rated over 2800, do you think Magnus Carlsen will hold on to the Number One spot until the end of the year?

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 Last week’s poll results:

Most of chess publishing is long hard work for very little money. A few thousand copies is what a chess book sells and there are many who want a slice of the cake. Retailers need to make a living, so there goes half the money. Outside the chess specialists, there is a requirement for middlemen, who take a third of what is left. Then there are transport, storage, printing, handling, editing, graphics, internet, rent, equipment, employees and not least, authors!

It is not a surprise that it took more than half a decade for us to make a small profit…

If you feel any sympathy for us at all, buy your Quality Chess books through a chess specialist shop. They not only provide you with the service of going to tournaments as well as having a store, they are also the backbone of our industry. Without them, there would be no chess books at all…

One thing we are doing in order to support the chess specialists is to publish hardback versions of our books and only sell them through the specialist network. These high quality books cost approximately €5 more than their inferior paperback cousins. They stay open when you put them on the table and provide a much nicer experience all-round.

The most recent example of this is Boris Gelfand’s Positional Decision Making in Chess, which at this moment in time is only available on Forward Chess and in high quality hardback. Usually this should reduce sales a bit; as many will be waiting for the cheaper version of the book (coming out early 2016 most likely), but it seems not in this case.

We are looking at a reprint within a week or so, which is an excellent change for me to ask if you have noticed any mistakes we should correct for the next version? We have found about 8 very minor things, but as no book is ever perfect (or close to it), I am sure there are more. We will be very interested in hearing your thoughts.

Meanwhile, Boris is doing a good job of promoting the book: http://www.uschess.org/content/view/13166/141/

We have been through this one a few times, but I just thought I wanted to run this one past the pollsters…

There are those who do not believe in talent for chess, and there are those who think that talent is everything. Clearly the truth is somewhere in-between. I remember someone on Facebook saying that there is no special talent for chess, only to be told by Peter Heine Nielsen that he knew a Norwegian guy with quite a bit of talent…

Obviously talent without work is poorer than work without talent. But with equal amounts of work, how much does talent add to your abilities?

Rating polls

The final of the three polls about rating makes more sense to view together with the two previous polls. Please draw your own conclusions!