Two sweet new resources
First, a great new site to find chess books, Chess Books Online. Two young chaps from the Netherlands have started it. They emailed me to let me know about it, and said that my blog is "informative and not at all inconvenient." Hmmm.
Second, I just got The Vienna Game, a ChessBase CD put together by Canadian FIDE Master Gregory Huber. It covers the Vienna and Bishop's openings, as they so often transpose into one another. It is fantastic: the explanation of plans and traps in the introduction is much more detailed and useful than for any other ChessBase CD I own, and better than any book I own on any opening. It is written for someone just starting out with the opening, someone who is not a GM, who needs some of the basic positions pointed out and clearly explained. Carsten Hansen says:
Second, I just got The Vienna Game, a ChessBase CD put together by Canadian FIDE Master Gregory Huber. It covers the Vienna and Bishop's openings, as they so often transpose into one another. It is fantastic: the explanation of plans and traps in the introduction is much more detailed and useful than for any other ChessBase CD I own, and better than any book I own on any opening. It is written for someone just starting out with the opening, someone who is not a GM, who needs some of the basic positions pointed out and clearly explained. Carsten Hansen says:
Huber has made a phenomenal effort in exploring these openings in depth. He clearly presents all the current data, with all sidelines labeled and evaluated, along with adding hundreds of his own suggestions and improvements over existing theory. This is an excellent effort, which I hope will find a wide readership. Anyone playing these opening as White or Black will definitely want to obtain this CD.I concur!
posted by Blue Devil Knight at 6/16/2006 06:53:00 PM
6 Comments:
Hi Antonio: See one of my previous posts analyzing how helpful it may or may not be to do a lot of problems there.
I don't like it very much: I like to work at my own pace at first, and then get faster as I gain expertise. That's why I'm doing the Circles....
However, see Temposchlucker has done like 50,000 problems there or something, using himself as an experiment to see if the chess tactics server helps him....
Whatever works to help us improve, and what we enjoy, is best!
I don't mean to burst your bubble but the "two young chaps from the Netherlands" sent me an identical e-mail with the exact same compliment - "informative and not at all inconvenient." I suspect they blasted out the same message to as many chess sites and chess blogs as they could find.
I wrote back and told them that I generally do not promote commercial sites on the blog, but would consider doing so if they were interested in making a donation to the Boylston Chess Foundation. Not surprisingly, I haven't heard back from them.
DG: yes, I knew it was a form letter, and that they'd sent it to a bunch of bloggers that they linked to on their "Partners" page, as part of their initial push to get some name recognition. I don't know about you, but the 'not inconvenient' line killed me.
I mentioned Chess Books Online because it is a very good site (most importantly), and secondarily why not reward a couple of enterprising young Turks creating a useful free service for the chess community? I have already had a lot of fun browsing their site and checking out the different coming attractions (for instance, Silman has an endgamebook coming out this year). Chess book browsing is probably something I am addicted to...
That said, I have a policy of no commercial links in my sidebar, which is what they were after (that is the way to really boost impact, as sidebar links are on every page).
They do have chess books that are out-of-print, and hence, unavaliable, from stores such as Barnes and Noble, and Borders. They books themselves are not out-of-print, just that the distributors for B&N and Borders do not get those books from the publisher. That's typical of many small publishers and non-domestic ones.
So, for example, Bronstein's books, The David V Goliath books, can be gotten off their site, but not at B&N, for instance.
Also, the vienna game dvd link seems to point right back to your blog instead of the product page :)
Thanks, zwei, I fixed the link.
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