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Dark Knight / Le Chevalier Noir
General Guidelines
---- Nous avons besoin d'un traduction français!
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Do you want to write a chess book? Of course you do!
Every player feels that he has at least one chess book in him. But the difficulty is how to start.
The answer is that almost every first chapter of chess books – on chess history, selected games, openings, quotations or whatever, have a commonality. They all discuss some aspect of Aron Nimzowitsch’s thought.
Once you have written that first chapter then the rest is easy peasy.
Phil Crocker, in Kingpin, has an excellent guide in his DIY article, “How to Write a Chess Book and Make Lots of Dosh”.
“Always start your book with a section on Nimzowitsch. Find, or make up, a few games he played with your opening. This is quite safe because it will be difficult for anyone to disprove that a dead player played a particular (preferably obscure) game. This is useful because it: a) uses up a whole chapter; and b) suggests your opening has a pedigree – most players will be unaware that Nimzowitsch played the dodgiest openings available.”
Sunil Weeramantry is an FIDE master, chess author and stepfather to Hikaru Nakamura.
He is the subject of a profile in the latest issue of New In Chess (2016#2).
One of the questions he was asked was:
What is the stupidest rule in chess?
To which he answered:
That you are not allowed to use two hands to move two pieces.
[Recall that at the FIDE World Cup 2015 in Baku, after eight games the match between Ian Nepomniachtchi and Hikaru Nakamura was tied, so an Armageddon game was needed. Nakamura won the toss and chose black, needed a draw but won.
But, as it turned out, he had used both hands when he castled on move five. Nepomniachtchi did not notice and lost the game but, finding out about it later, launched an appeal, which was turned down.]
From an article on the Hall of Fame festivities before the first round of the U.S. Championships in St. Louis, 2016
Prior to the evening's festivities, Nakamura played an eight-hour, 283 game bullet match on Chess.com with Canadian GM Eric Hansen. He won 234.5-48.5, although that means losing 50 rating points!
"I can't feel my hand anymore," Hansen said during the match. He said it took him 222 games to finally flag the U.S. Champion.
"So a good book helps you to focus on really the important points. Because there are many databases like Correspondence, Computer, Mega Database, etc. You can easily get lost. So the importance of books suddenly grows. Earlier books were the main source of information. Then they were replaced by databases, but now we have so much material available that one needs to be guided through this."
- Boris Gelfand on the importance of books in a chessplayer's education
"We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office." - Aesop
"Only the dead have seen the end of war." - Plato
"If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination." - Thomas De Quincey
A kibitzer comment during the game Karjakin-Svidler, Russian Teams Rd6, on chessbomb today:
cycledan: The candidates tournament is a good idea but I think we should have a selection committee to choose the challenger next time made up of ChessBomb commenters.
Writing about chess, American writer Raymond Chandler (1888-1959), in his work 'The Long Goodbye' (1953), penned
"As elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you could find anywhere outside an advertising agency."
"We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office." - Aesop
"Only the dead have seen the end of war." - Plato
"If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination." - Thomas De Quincey
"You know, comrade Pachman, I don't enjoy being a Minister, I would rather play chess like you, or make a revolution in Venezuela."
Dr. Ernesto (Che) Guevara {1928-1967}, speaking to Czechoslovakian GM Ludek Pachman {1924-2003}, likely at Prague 1966, where Guevara was living secretly for a time. Che, born in Argentina, was a competitive chess player from age 12. Later, he was a medical doctor, very close associate of Cuban leader Fidel Castro, and served as Cuban Minister of Finance. By 1966, he was a full-blown international revolutionary. The quote is from "Checkmate in Prague: Memoirs of Ludek Pachman", London 1975, publishers Faber and Faber. Pachman had been an ardent Communist himself, but that changed with the Prague Spring of 1968, which was crushed by the Soviets; Pachman was later imprisoned, before being allowed to emigrate to West Germany in 1972.
"...the most significant contribution to civilization since the ... wheel."
"This remarkable coup, by means of which the King is spirited away to safety while the Rook magically appears on the scene, is probably the most significant contribution to civilization since the discovery of the wheel."
Irving Chernev's (mock) view of castling in chess, from Logical Chess: Move by Move, 1957, p. 132.
Dogs will bark, but the caravan of chess moves on.
Re: "...the most significant contribution to civilization since the ... wheel."
"...there are none so virtuous as a reformed King's Gambit player."
- GM John Shaw, 'The King's Gambit', p. 5
"We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office." - Aesop
"Only the dead have seen the end of war." - Plato
"If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination." - Thomas De Quincey
For years the two classics were Reuben Fine’s Basic Chess Endings (1941) and Ilya Rabinovich’s Endspil (1927).
In the 70s the English translation of Yuri Averbakh’s Comprehensive Chess Endings five volumes appeared published by Batsford. These were more reference books than manuals.
Other good guides appearing later were Karsten Muller’s Fundamental Chess Endings (2001), Paul Keres’ Practical Chess Endings (1974) and van Perlo’s Endgames Tactics (2006).
One could easily come up with a dozen other good guides.
The one that now stands above the others is Dvoretsky’s Endgame Manual. The first edition came out in 2003.
Three early reviews:
Lubomir Kavalek – Dvoretsky’s Endgame Manual comes close to an ultimate one-volume manual on the endgame.
John Watson – DEM is quite simply a masterpiece of research and insight. Most of all, Dvoretsky’s analysis is staggering in its depth and accuracy.
Erik Sobjerg – to call this the best book on endgames ever written seems to be an opinion shared by almost all reviewers and commentators.
_______
I have the first edition and lately wondered if I should buy the 4th edition that had just appeared (2014). How can you improve on what is already arguably the best?
Well, I did buy the fourth edition and for my chess quote, I give the introduction to that volume which supplies an answer to the question I just posed:
From the Author (Fourth Edition)
Readers familiar with previous editions of the Manual have probably noticed that the new edition is larger than the previous one. But it is not because its content has been significantly increased or is more complicated – it is not. On the contrary, I have tried to make it more accessible to study, adding about 200 new diagrams to the text. Those who read the book without a board (there are many players who are able to do this) will find it easier to follow complex examples. In addition, the new diagrams will draw your attention to many interesting and instructive moments previously buried in the text and variations.
As always with new editions, I have revised the text with clarifications and corrections which were found since the release of the previous edition. Significant revisions have been made in some aspects of the theory of rook endings. For that, I would like first and foremost to thank the analyst Vardan Pogosyan. In 2011-2012, I actively corresponded with Pogosyan, and he showed me many of the discoveries he had made, leading me to rethink some important theoretical concepts.
Relatively recently, the computer database “Lomonosov” was created; it accurately evaluates seven-piece endings (previously only six-figure endings were available.) Naturally, I checked the book’s seven-piece examples with “Lomonosov” database and corrected any errors found.
On the Jeopardy! show of May 13, 2016, five quotes by Benjamin Franklin were to be guessed in part:
Time is money
In this world nothing can be certain except death and taxes
There never was a good war or a bad peace
Fish and visitors stink in three days
And a quote, from his Morals of Chess, which has been reduced to this modern paraphrase:
"Chess teaches foresight, by having to plan ahead; vigilance, by having to keep watch over the whole chess board; caution, by having to restrain ourselves from making hasty moves; and finally, we learn from chess the greatest maxim in life - that even when everything seems to be going badly for us we should not lose heart, but always hoping for a change for the better, steadfastly continue searching for the solutions to our problems." - Benjamin Franklin (1706-90)
A recent interview with Israel Gelfer talked about security measures for the coming Olympiad:
During the forthcoming Olympiad we will make some precautionary measures. Of course, there will be gates for security. It's mainly for security but it will also produce a sound if someone has anything small in the pocket. The players will be not allowed to bring mobiles, watches and pens. The organizers will provide pens for every player.
Premise 1: If you are given a ballpoint pen, it usually doesn’t work
Premise 2: If you buy a ballpoint yourself, it always works. If you start to win when using it to write down your moves, it is your lucky, lucky pen.
Quotes
- It seems safe to bet that they won't work.
- No way can I play without my transparent black Bic.
- Don't see anything wrong with the principle of provided pens only for a much smaller event. Slightly paranoid but minimal harm.
For an entire olympiad? That could make for quite an impressive mess. That and arbiters being rushed off their feet providing pens that work
- One practical difference with the organisers providing pens instead of the players bringing theirs is if it stops working.
If my own pen stops working it's my problem to find another one to write down my last move before making another one.
If a pen supplied by the organisers stops working I'd be entitled to stop the clock and report the faulty pen to the arbiter for them to deal with.
- They will need to rush through an amendment to the FIDE Laws of Chess allowing a player to stop the clock and call the arbiter if they have any difficulties with the pen.
- I can guarantee that around move 30, it will stop working. I realise you mentioned that point yourself.
I always take a pencil, which is less likely to fail.
- I inadvertently gave the solution to the problem in my edit to my previous post. Players should, of course, 'accidentally' snap their competition supplied pens until they run out.
- If somebody has a lucky pen, surely that must contravene the Laws? But which one? Perhaps 11.3a or 12.2a.
Player is thinking. Opponent approaches the arbiter away from the board and says, 'My opponent has a lucky pen.' Arbiter, 'I don't believe in luck in chess'. Opponent, 'But I do'.
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