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Eleni Papachristou

Review: The Quality Chess Puzzle Book by Shaw

Title: The Quality Chess Puzzle Book.
Author: John Shaw.
Publisher: Quality Chess.
Year: 2010.
Pages: 354.
Price: 23,99€.

I have never been a fan of books on tactical puzzles. I do not know the reason, it could be that I find tactics beneath me (I like to win games on solid positional ground, not on the seemingly random tactical skirmish), or maybe it is that puzzle books force you to really study them, you cannot read the book without effort. It could also be that as tactics is not my strong suit, I try to avoid it as to not threaten my self-steem.

Anyway only recently I took a liking on solving tactical puzzles. Two years ago I read Weteschnik's book on tactics and found it a very positive experience, but other than that, the other books I took interest in were not about tactics.

John Shaw's Quality Chess Puzzle Book is, as you may deduce by its tittle, a book of tactical exercises. It has been a collaborative effort of the publisher (I seem to recall that Aagaard provided the exercises for Shaw to choose from, and Shaw chose them and wrote the prose of the book).

As a disclaimer, I must admit that I have not studied the whole book, but studied the first 512 exercises (around 70% of it).

Unlike traditional puzzle books, this one is not organized by theme, nor it is organized by difficulty. It contains 15 chapters on random themes. For example there is a chapter with some of Ivanchuk games, two other called Missed opportunities, etc. The point is that the themes make no sense from a purely chess perspective, so you will not be thinking about pins in this chapter and forks in the next one, because you will have no idea what to expect. Inside a chapter, the level of the exercises increases, but it lacks any scale to guide you on how difficult an exercise is.


The book contains 735 exercises (I remind you that I can only truly talk about the first 512 of them) plus at the beginning of each chapter there is a short introduction with some more games (which I did not care enough to study and do not think you would miss anything by ignoring it either).

The edition I own is the paperback one and I am quite happy with it (usual Quality Chess). As this book will expend a lot of time in your hands, expect to wear it off fast. In my case, the cover is starting to suffer, but nothing plasticizing it would not solve.

I have developed a liking of hardcover books (which in this case is 6€ more expensive) and now I regret not having that edition instead. That is because it seems to me now that this book can be enjoyed in many years to come, and having a better edition makes sense, as 20 years from now would be good as new. But do not let my snobism affect you.

At 735 exercises the book is huge. Each exercise costs you less than 3 cents of an €.


I have a little guide to make these reviews, and one concept I review is the prose. As this is a puzzle book, talking about how it is written makes little sense, but habits are good, and guides are good too. So the little prose the book has is good, sometimes Shaw makes jokes, and sometimes he tells you stories. I like it. But of course it is totally irrelevant for this type of book.

The analysis, as far as I have dared to oppose Shaw, is spot on. I do not think I have found any invalid problem. My only problem would be that sometimes my solution is not considered by the author, but who could blame him when it is clearly inferior to the proposed solution?

The book is a good book, no doubt about that. The first thing to check is that solutions are spot on, and that is the case. It could be better if it had more failed attempts, but nevertheless Shaw's failed attempts quite often agrees with me (and many times, with the player's choice in the game). The fact that the theme is random makes it more difficult. I do not know if it is good or bad, but I prefer it like that. In a real game you do not know the theme either.

One point I dislike of the book is that it has no indication of the level of the exercises. Normally this indications are just very rough approximations, but they are very useful.  Each chapter is increasing in difficulty but that is not something you may realize. At least for me it was not. There is a point that you would do better jumping to the next chapter than banging your head against unsolvable problems, and if you realized the exercises to come in the chapter were still harder, you would, but as it stands, you may not do it.

So, do I recommend the book?

I always find it tricky when the answer is not wholeheartedly. There is always many sides in the issue. So let me tell you a story first.

I own this book since 2015. I bought it at the same time as The secret life of bad bishops and Positional decision making. I solved 150 exercises relatively fast, and then put the book down, and only recently (in the last month) I surged through it, solving 350 more.

Why is that? Well, the exercises are difficult! I left the book when it was a pain to go through it, plain and simple.

Of course this is not Shaw's fault, but brings me to a very important point. It is my opinion that any kind of exercise book has to be the right level for you. If it is too easy, you most likely will not think hard enough to improve your chess (and when the exercises are difficult enough, you may be tempted to dismiss them with shallow solutions instead of delving into the subtleties of the problem). If the exercises are too much for you on the other hand, you most likely will put down the book as you will get demoralized.

It is getting repetitive by now, but I'm at 2200 elo points. I have been working hard on tactical puzzle this three months (with Aagaard's GM Preparation - Calculation and Dvoretsky's Recognizing Your Opponent's Resources -do not expect a review on those books soon, though, it will be a long time since I manage to finish enough of them to feel comfortable reviewing them). So my hope is that my tactical awareness has grown and I am now rated higher, but most probably this is only a wet dream of mine, because this things take longer to settle.

Anyway, as a 2200 player, spending unlimited time (between 5 and 10 minutes, but I do not time myself with this book) on the exercises makes me solve around 50% of them. The first on a chapter I solve faster and with no mistakes, while the last ones provoke me nightmares (I failed 9.5 out of the last 11 problems in chapter 8, 8 out of the last 11 problems in chapter 9, and 3.5 out of 5 in chapter 10). All in all, that is the right level for me, and seeing that the starts are easier and the endings are harder, it may be a good book for players rated 2000 elo points or above.

The endings of the chapters is what made me put down the book. I did not know that each chapter starts easy and then goes into mad levels of difficulty. On the contrary I thought that what was to come was even more difficult than what I have already studied, so what was the point in continuing with the book? Now that you are aware of this, please jump into the next chapter when you cannot solve any more exercises of the present one.

My last point before the conclusion is a monetary point. At five minutes per exercise (being on the cautious side, but you will not be solving all the exercises after all, so it is a good approximation), you will spend more than 60 hours with the book. At 24€, you are paying 1€ for each 2.5h of entertainment. I do not think anyone can make you a better deal than that.

So I recommend this book to players above 2000 elo points with some caveats. Do not try to solve all the exercises. Stop and go to the next chapter when you get stuck. You may find that you are comfortable with only half of the problems in the book. Well, more than 300 exercises are plenty!

If you have less than 2000 elo points, go with Weteschnik!

PS: I am reviewing the book while having not finishing it because I am suffering in chapter 12 already, chapter 13 seems to be easy (according to its introduction), but chapters 14 and 15 (starting with problem 558) seem to be hell. I do not look forward to the pain of solving them. So I have decided to move to another book on tactics :)

PS2: I started to make this reviews because it seemed to me that there was a lack of good reviews out there. I bought books based on good reviews that greatly disappointed me. I think that is because the reviews were based on a very quick reading of the book. If I had reviewed this book in 2015 when I put it down, I would have said that it is a great book but with a very high level, while now I think it is just a little bit more difficult that what I'm comfortable with. So yes, I was right, quick reviews do not cut it.

Review: The Attacking Manual 1 2nd edition by Aagaard

Title: The Attacking Manual 1 2nd edition.
Author: Jacob Aagaard.
Publisher: Quality Chess.
Year: 2010.
Pages: 320.
Price: 29.99€ (paperback).

The attacking Manual 1 is a book in which, according to the introduction, Jacob Aagaard has spent a lot of years of his life. The book tries to explain how attacks are conceived more than executed, which is kind of different from other books on attack (see for example Gormally's Mating the Castled King).

From this perspective, the book delves into seven concepts of attacking play (the Contents page is confusing, hence I translate it):

• Bring all your Toys to the Nursery Party: You should attack with all your pieces
• Don’t lose your Breath: Attack as fast as possible.
• Add some Colour to your Play: Weakness in a colour complex.
• Size Matters!: The quantity of the units attacking is also important, not only the quality.
• Hit ’em where it hurts: Attack the weak points.
• Chewing on Granite: Attack the strong points so you gain access to the weak points.
• Evolution/Revolution: While attacking, be mindful that you may stop, gather strength (evolution) and then go at it again (revolution).

Apart from that, there are 15 attacking games commented and a last chapter with 50 exercises to solve.

Normally I am quite pleased with the quality of QualityChess products, but I must admit that this one is subpar, there are some mistakes in the text and in the diagrams, certainly more than usual. This point is even worse when you think it is a second edition, where this things should have been already solved. Other than that, this is a lengthy book at 320 pages.

The book is very well written (if you disregard the problems with the edition) and very appealing, typical of Aagaard's style, similar to those books he wrote for Everyman. The ideas exposed are often very well known, only adding to the known themes new examples. However, it has a chapter on Evolution/Revolution which really made an impact on me. The concept is that when you are attacking, you evolve your position until the point where you cannot evolve it any longer by normal means, and you start sacrificing (revolution). Afterwards, however, you do not need to continue the attack like a mad man, you may stop it to bring reinforcements (evolution). I had never seen this concept anywhere else and found it very interesting.

Aagaard tried in this book not to suffocate you with variations, striving to offer only the key variations of the position. I think he has not succeed at all. A lot of times I found myself having to start the engine to show me why the position was in fact winning and not only complex, while other times I was following 10 moves long variations which made no sense to me (surely proposed by the computer) for no apparent reason. In those moments, even if there was a reason, the fact that I did not get it is a flaw.

All in all the book is interesting. Its reading is easy and interesting, and you may very well read it quite fast. The analysis may not be the most on point I have ever seen, but it is not bad, just not great.

The main problem I find with this book is how easy is to read it and do not assimilate anything. Normally you would be reading quite an interesting paragraph just to be distracted by some game. You would want to finish it as fast as possible to be able to continue with the reasoning. When you realize it, you have finished the book and have learned nothing. I must admit that it is wrong to transfer my personal flaws to the rest of the chess aficionados,  but if you are like me, you know you need to make a lot of effort to stop and think instead of read and nod.

Personally I liked Gormally's book better, it is cheaper (this book is very expensive, costing 5€ more than its peers at the same publisher) at the same length, it requires more or less the same level from you, it has better analysis (this is: deep when it needs to be, shallow elsewhere), and it has a lot more exercises, which is what gets me going. So I would only recommend this book to you if you have already Gormally's book, and with the strong caveat that to really profit from this book you should have to put the extra effort.

PS: I solved the 50 exercises with 10 minutes for each position, working an hour straight in a batch of 6 exercises. With that conditions I was solving a little bit more than half of them (at 2200 fide strength), while with 5 minutes for position I was getting destroyed.

Review: Build up your Chess by Yusupov

Title: Build up your chess.
Author: Artur Yusupov.
Publisher: Quality Chess.
Year: 2008.
Pages: 264.
Price: 23.99€ paperback.


In this review I want to talk about Yusupov's series in Quality Chess. I have chosen to portrait the first book on the series but it would generally be applicable to every book, not just this one.

Another important caveat I want to make is that I have read the first two books and the last exercises from the last book.

This series of books is an acclaimed collection of exercise books. It has come to my attention that Yusupov has made another book to complement the series which I'm reviewing and Quality Chess is going to publish it in english (if you speak german, you are lucky, because I think it has already been published there). So now that Yusupov's books are again on the spotlight it seems only natural to fill this horrible gap in my blog :)

There are nine books in the series, grouped in three colors (orange, blue and green), named 'build up`your chess', 'boost your chess',  and 'chess evolution'. You are supposed to read each color in this order.

Each of the books is divided into 24 chapters and a final test. Each chapter has an introduction of the chapter, which spans around four pages, and twelve exercises. The exercises have points of difficulty which are rewarded if you have seen some key moves of the solution. You can add up all the points to score your final evaluation of the unit. It may be that you have done excellently down to you have to repeat the unit.

The final test has only exercises which encompass everything studied in the book, and there are 24 of them.

The books aim to give you a solid base in every aspect of the game, so you are going to study some openings (really it is almost only exercises, so not heavy theory there), tactics, strategy and endings. As each chapter delves in a particular subject, you are not going to get bored easily, which is great for someone like me that likes to read various books at once just to change the pace.

All in all you are getting 312 exercises in every aspect of the game. At a standard lenght of 264 pages, you can hardly ask for more, but GM Preparation series are thicker, hence pack more exercises. Maybe compared to them or some other books 312 does not seem much, but I never felt that there were few problems, it just felt right, so no complains there.

The level of the exercises is high enough so that me (at 2200) went through the first two books fast and steady, but always felt I was challenged. As I see it, anyone starting from 1700 can enjoy the books.  Players lower than that should however download the excerpt of the first one and see for themselves, because it includes a complete chapter.

I like exercise books a lot, so I do not care much that the prose is sparse. What do you expect after all? For me the prelude of every chapter before the exercise was something to go through as fast as possible, but the official stand is to study it carefully and spend at least an hour on it. I cannot say it worked much for me as I already knew the subjects discussed, but it is there, so maybe it is profitable for you.

The quality of the solutions for me it is the worst part of the series. It happened to me a lot (a lot maybe is twice per chapter maximum) that exercises that I failed to solve had a flawed solution. Those normally (maybe exclusively) would come from positional exercises.  In those exercises a solution was put forward, but the machine would regard other moves as equal or better than the one recommended.

Positional exercises are the most difficult ones, I know, and the machine likes some lines which may be ok but Yusupov tries to show you the easiest path. But in this kind of case, I need from the author the statement that other moves are possible (and list them) but the one in the solution is the one he likes and reason it, otherwise, I would rather believe the machine at 3300 elo than Yusupov at 2700.

All in all, however, I think this series of books is pretty good. Maybe some solutions are not on the spot, but I have not seen anything so comprehensive in the market in any other place. Hence I recommend the series to anyone from 1700 to 2200. Those below 1700, I would recommend to try their hand at the excerpt. If they feel that hitting a brick wall while doing it, then go for something more elementary,. Those with more than 2200 will certainly pick some things here and there. There are challenging exercises and you will have to put a lot of work. But 9 books is a lot of money invested, so maybe you can go directly to the blue series.

As a testament of the difficulty of the books, I have some anecdotal evidence. A friend of mine and me, both at 2200, got a hold on the last book, and made the final test. We allowed us 2h for the whole thing (so 5 minutes per exercise). We both failed to pass the test narrowly.

Review: Tactimania - Flear

Title: Tactimania
Author: Glenn Flear.
Publisher: Quality Chess.
Year: 2011.
Pages: 264.
Price: 21.99€.

Here I have another oldie for you. This book, as the name suggests, is a book about tactics. It contains around 450 tactical exercises from the praxis of Glenn Flear and his wife. It is a family work, as the illustrations come from their son.

The book contains 13 chapters, eleven of them dealing with some theme (from mates to trying to save lost positions), while the last two are tests of around 20 positions each. Those two last chapters have  their solution in the next page too, as the whole book, but they are called test because you get to score points and see at what level you are at.

This book is quite hard to make sense of. It is littered with drawings one would assume target a kids' audience, but the exercises can get quite difficult. When I picked up this book I thought I would use it as Weteschnik Tactics from scratch, as a way to warm up, but that is not so, I was unable to solve some problems with one star (it has only three levels of difficulty).

The length of the book at 264 pages is ok, but some of the pages have drawings, so you actually get less chess than that. To compare, while this book contains 450 exercises, Weteschnik packs 300  (easier) and Quality Chess Puzzle Book (I hope to review it sometime, when I manage to finish it) packs more than 700 (harder).

The solutions are normally correct, sometimes mirroring the computer line exactly even if it does not make sense from a human point of view. In those cases I would have loved to have more depth, because I was left wondering where all those moves came to be and had to put the position in the computer to understand them. On the other hand, some problems have duals solutions which are not contemplated, or even wrong solutions according to my computer. They are not many, but they exists.

You should know by now that wrong solutions annoy me a lot, because I get the feeling that each time I fail an exercise I need to check it against the computer to ensure my solution is not flawed. But that is not what defined this work for me.

For me the drawings are terrible, but I think it is a taste thing, and you can do like I did and just ignore them. So that is not what defined this work either.

The most striking feature of this book is the choosing of the exercises. Flear put into himself the task of finding tactical exercises in his and his wifes' games, and came up with a very strange collection.

While I was reading the book, I never got the hang of it. In normal books you start looking at sacrifices and such, normally that is what works in those. But here, as the number of games was so low, some very untypical examples managed to make it to the book.

That is a good thing in the sense that you have to shift your way of thinking, but if you are anything like me, you will get annoyed at some exercises.

All in all I cannot recommend this book. I do not like the drawings, nor I feel the exercises are well selected (although I told you already that is a good thing!, but I do not like it). It does not have that many exercises, so that is not a point for it either. At the end of the day, there are better books to choose from.

 Lastly, if you decide to go for the book, I can tell you about chapter 12, which has the first test. I went to solve the 19 exercises in it in two hours with a friend of mine rated approximately like me (2200). We had to photocopy the problems as the solutions were intermixed with them, and we wrote down our solutions. The final result was that we classified both as tournament players (with a very similar score), which is lower than international players, IM and GM. I felt that two hours was very little time to solve all the exercises.

Review: Positional Decision Making in Chess by Gelfand

Title: Positional Decision Making in Chess.
Author: Boris Gelfand.
Publisher: Quality Chess.
Year: 2015.
Pages: 285.
Price: 29.99€ (hardback).

This review has been a hard one to make. I have had this book for half a year now, and I have not been able to finish it. I am at page 255, though! The reason is that I do not like the book, at least not when I try to work hard on it. I will explain it more in what follows, but first, let me state some obvious fact: The immense majority of the chess community (and I may be the lone exception) loves this book.

For example, John Hartmann,  the English Chess Federation which voted it the best book of 2015, Emil Sutovsky or Peter Svidler, to name just a few. If you go to its publisher's page, you will find a long list of praising reviews.

What is wrong with me then? Well, I will try to explain myself as well as I can. I have done an auxiliary post on what I like in books, which will help put my reasoning into context, but I will try to make this review as self contained as possible.

The book is written by Gelfand and Aagaard. Gelfand has put the chess knowledge, and Aagaard the how to write knowledge. It has been done through conversations from the authors, Aagaard asking questions trying to get as much knowledge as possible out of Gelfand. The book consists of annotated games from Rubinstein and Gelfand.

 It is part of a series of books (as of this moment it is unknown how many more it will be), and this one concentrates, as the name suggests, on how to take positional decisions at the board.

The book is divided into five chapters plus an interview from 2012. Each chapter deals with a topic: Rubinstein, The squeeze, Space advantage, Transformation of pawn structures and Transformation of advantages.

While reading the book I never got the impression that an overall idea in the book, or in each chapter, existed. For me it transpired too much that the book was a product of conversations rather than someone's grand design. Gelfand will not try to make a systematic review of the topic at hand, but will show you some examples that he finds interesting, and in its games he will try to explain his thought process.

The edition of the book, at least its hard cover, is excellent. I do not know why I even continue to comment on that in Quality Chess products, because it is always like this. The length is quite okay at nearly 300 pages, but it feels a thin book nevertheless, or at least that was the impression I've got when I unpacked the book. It may be the hard cover that is so thick that make the rest of the book, by contrast, look thin, but nevertheless you cannot argue with the raw facts: the book is in the medium range, it is not short, nor is it long.

The prose of the book is uneven. I have think long and hard how best to describe it, and that is the word I came up with.

The first chapters find the language somewhat redundant, with some odd choices here and there. Those passages make you feel that you are truly in a conversation with Gelfand. Aagaard stated that the language was chosen carefully, so my only conclusion is that this was the purpose of the book. I, however, do not like it too much. Other chapters, the later ones, are more normal, which I liked best.

But the feeling that the book jumps from one place to another as if it were a real conversation is there all the way through, and it gives you the feeling of a not too well thought work.

On the other hand, the prose is really generous! You do not normally find books with so much literature in it, and specially in the middle of the game. There are 34 games in 260 pages (not counting the interview), so you get 7 pages of commentary for each game! That is quite a lot and I think it is a really great decision.

The analysis in the book is uneven too. Rubinstein's games are normally annotated lightly, but Rubinstein - Alekhine, Karlsbad 1911 got 9 pages. I have found this game annotated in two previous works, Shereshevsky's Endgame Strategy and Marin's Learn from the legends. I do not think that Gelfand has done a better job than Marin, and I felt that he was not building up, but doing the work from the ground.

On the other hand, Gelfand's games have generally detailed analysis, and more importantly, big junks chunks (sorry for my bad english) of great inside. But at the beginning the level of detail is overall noticeable smaller than at the end of the book. Those last games will help the hard-work student  quite a lot, as a detailed analysis will surely improve your chess.
 

So, let's wrap it up:

The key factor of this book is that offers you great insight on the thinking process of a great player. The prose is great, and although I do not like some redundancies here and there, the general feeling is that the book is really well written.

I can see how Svidler and Sutovsky liked the book: They do not expect to learn anything from normal books, so this at least gives them some interesting insight into other super GM mind.

And I can see how normal people like me cherish this book greatly. The book is, after all, a masterpiece, so what is not to like about it?

Well, first of all, for me it is a bit odd that the book is called 'Positional decision making in chess'. A name like 'My best games by Genfald' would suit it far better. As the book tries in no way to explain a theme but only shows you examples, it is better to see it as just a collection of games selected by diffuse criteria.

We have to assume, too, that there are games sparsely annotated. I liked those quite less, but that is a personal opinion. On the other hand, the ones heavily annotated for me were difficult to study. Something in them was amiss, or maybe it is me, I do not know.

But my main concern with the book is not these things.  The main problem for me is that while giving you great insight of the mind of a great player, it will not improve your overall chess. Yes, you will enjoy reading the book immensely, you will come to realize of quite a number of interesting things, but at the end of the day, when Gelfand says that in certain positions he is interested in improving the position more than in the objective evaluation of the position, that will not improve your chess one bit. The amount of advice directly applicable to your games is slim. Of course, if you study the games in detail, it will improve your chess, but do the people making the good reviews have done so? I know I have not been able to...

It saddened me when the English Chess Federation chose this book over Mauricio Flores' Chess Structures. I think Flores' work to be so much better in almost every way, except in giving this great insight that is not useful in a real game. Flores has written a masterpiece, one that future generations ought to remember as high as My System by Nimzowitch, while Gelfand has written a very entertaining book to read, accessible to every level of play, but ultimately of limited use to improve your chess.

So now comes the stupid thing of this review: I do not recommend this book, there are a lot of books out there that will help you with your chess a lot more. I have reviewed some here, and I will continue to do so. But I surely not regret one bit having bought it, and I will for sure buy the next one. It is true that the book will not improve your chess, but it is a great book, entertaining and insightful, and it does have some small nuggets of true wisdom, so all in all, there is no need to have always perfect books to study, you may as well indulge yourself in some lighter reading once in a while!

Addendum:

Jacob Aagaard took the time to respond to this review. I will paste it unedited, but you can click here and read it in the original page.

Now to move on to your review and answering some of the questions it raises. If you want, you are very welcome to add this to your review on your site. If you don’t want to, don’t. Our blog is an open forum; your website is promoting your views.

There are some claims that are not true in my opinion, and as I structured the book, I feel my opinion counts.

A big claim is that there is no overall structure to the book and that this is just loose conversations collected in some haphazard way. 

We spent quite a bit of time structuring the book at the beginning and to give a coherent look into Boris’ way of thinking and approach. We did not want this to be a manual in the sense that it had to cover all elements or in some way give a complete picture of the topic of positional chess. There are other books trying to do this, in different ways and they are more or less all valuable. What I wanted to do with this book was to explain how Boris, one of the greatest strategists of his generation if not of all time. I wanted to explain the basis of his decisions, which (besides calculation, which we will debate in the next book) are mainly surrounded around the five topics we discuss in the book. 

The overall idea for the book: Positional Decision Making in Chess. It is about decision making, looking into the brain of a top player. What is interesting is not only what he uses as a basis for his decisions, but also what he ignores. Looking through the book now, it seems perfectly nicely structured to me, as does the chapters. Each chapter brings in a topic of special relevance, shows the influence from Rubinstein (and others) and then moving into more and more complicated games from Boris. 

I am happy the book feels chatty. I wanted it to. It took a lot of work squeezing it out of Boris!

Uneven analysis of the games you say. I assume you mean uneven in length. Yes, some things were more interesting than others. However, the way you have written it, it seems you are criticism the level of the analysis, which I do not think was your intention. In the same way you use the word “junks” instead of “chunks”, which is a bit unfortunate. 

Redundancies as a stylistic tool: Yes, we are consciously using this, with the intention of creating lasting improvement. Telling people something once and then moving one does not have that effect.

Comparison with Marin. Which edition did you compare with? The new edition of Legends was heavily influenced by my deep analysis, which was done first and only then compared with Marin’s. Actually it took some effort to explain Marin where he was wrong in the first book .

Yes, the explanations are different; the purpose of our annotations is to show what Boris took from it. I can understand why this is not a viewpoint that will interest everyone, but I certainly found it the most fascinating. I am interested in how strong players think and showing that. And this is what we did. 

Size of the book. There are a few elements that can make you feel the way you do: Our paper is of higher quality than for example the paper from all other publishers as far as I can tell. A 400 page book by QC will be slimmer than a 224 page book from a number of other publishers. In general books from Quality Chess are longer than those of most other publishers (MacFarland and Chess Informant are exceptions, but not direct comparisons). This is not by choice, but because we often employ authors who have a lot to say, rather than wanting to have the highest hourly rate. And yes, this is certainly by choice. (Obviously Boris had a lot to say and did say a lot, but there are less chess moves in the book, as you pointed out, and as such, also less diagrams). 

The final reason for you not liking the book is where we come down to opinion and disagreement the most. You say that the book does not lead to improvement. There are a number of areas where we can improve. Exercise books, opening books, encyclopedias like Chess Structures offer different ways. But famous trainers like Dvoretsky have always suggested that you should play through game collections with the annotations from strong players, to see how they think and see if it in any way can improve your own thinking. This book was meant to emphasize the thinking part of this, rather than the best games aspect. And the feedback we have had is that it indeed leads to improvement, as I expected it to.

Having argued against all these points, there is one I definitely do not want to argue against. You clearly did not like the book. Of course I am sad that you were disappointed. But I have not yet seen a book that everyone liked, so I can live with it.

What I like in books, my personal biases

When you review a book, you do that through your personal biases, after all, everybody has its own tastes, and you cannot put those aside to make an unbiased assessment. You may try it, yes, but you will never fully succeed.

So I want to state clearly what I search in books. This way you will know to put my reviews in context.

For me chess books are a source of joy (as I hope happens for you too). I have been reading chess books from more than twenty years now and one can say that I have a very classical library.

The main problem I came to realize was that I have been reading chess books 'incorrectly', only for the joy. I've read the text, but never truly stopped to think about the moves or the position. So at the end of the day, while I had a wonderful time reading those classical books, my chess level has not improved because I have not done any real work on it.

I have been trying to improve my chess for a year and a half now. In my quest to achieve this, my way of appreciating books have changed. Now I need to study seriously a book, because now I want to improve too, not only enjoy the reading. So now the attention has shifted from 'is the book well written' to 'will the book improve my chess'.

And how do you evaluate if a book improves your chess? Well, for me the easiest metric would be (elo points gained / book), but it turns out it is quite difficult to measure that, both because a book will not so dramatically improve your chess, and because the improvement is a continuous process over time, and it is quite difficult to discern the causes over long periods.

The second metric I like to put forward is (time spent thinking / book). It stands to reason that the more time you put studying chess, the higher the improvement you will experience.

When you use the (time spent thinking / book) metric to evaluate a book the first thing you notice is that exercise books are heavily favored. That's because one has to spend time thinking about the exercise to solve it, and it takes so few space in print that you can have quite a huge number of exercises. Think for example on QC puzzle book with 725 exercises, or the new book by Dvoretsky 'Recognizing Your Opponent's Resources'. Obviously it is not only about the number of exercises, as you have to find them entertaining, at your level, and they have to offer quality solutions, and I will take that into account, but overall, yes, these books are favored.

Books that try to explain some deeper knowledge, however, are heavily disfavored. They show a handful of examples and spend a lot of time on literature (or variations in the examples), but do not force you to think over the example, they require you to on your own be disciplined and don't rush through the examples to be able to read more of the literature.

I have to confess that I'm quite bad at not rushing through the examples. I do not know if it is a common thing, but I'm yet to know someone who is not afflicted by this at some level. So for this type of books the important thing is: do the author makes a good job of preventing me from rushing to the end of the book?

There are some tools at the author disposal. To find compelling examples and ask the reader to pause and think for a moment are two of those, but there is no clear and sure path. There lies the difficulty.

I may be a lone traveler on this boat, though, as I often find that other reviewers will rate books on how entertaining they are, instead of their instructional value. Or maybe rate them on its instructional value on the surface... maybe the book seems very instructional, it may provide clear rules and thorough examples, but when you try to study it you simply cannot do it and the book and its instructions will never transpire in your games.

In my reviews, I will always try to be very critique about this, I will always ponder if I have been able to really work on the book or not. Of course, this will always be a personal thing. Maybe what works for me won't work for you, but I will always (specially in bad reviews) try to explain my point of view.

So here you have my dissonant voice, I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoy writing this pieces.