.jpeg)
Interesting and entertaining stories and pictorials around chess. Studies and problems, and how amateurs and world world-class players react to them.
Cross your heart: when was the last time you pulled out a board and replayed games from a chess book? Followed the moves and the analysis it contained? Most amateurs and club players will only look at diagrams and attempt to play a few moves in their minds.
Unless of course you are a grandmaster or a strong IM. These people can follow everything in their minds. I vividly remember how the young Vishy Anand would grab the latest volume of the Chess Informant, curl up in a corner, and spend hours giggling and laughing. He was replaying the games in his head. Players of this calibre can read chess books like Agatha Christie novels.
So what to do? Well, why not publish chess books electronically? The world is moving towards e-books, and this is especially advantageous for chess. ChessBase has developed a new book form for chess. Our goal is to make it very easy to write tutorials and e-books. Any chess player or chess trainer should be able to do it.
Experimenting with the system, I have managed to put together a lot of interesting stories in a relatively short span of time. Of course, I had decades of material I had used on our news page, and elsewhere. Most of the stories had sunk into the bottomless obscurity of the Internet archives, where nobody would ever find them again. But I have them all on my hard drive.
So we took the first twenty chapters of what I had written and designed an e-book, entitled "Frederic' Chess Tales – Part one". It is intended to show you how our e-publication works. Naturally, you can replay all the moves of games, on a graphic chessboard. You can move the pieces on diagrams, start an engine to help you understand everything. You can enjoy pictures (which enlarge when you click or tap on them), and watch videos.
Much of this will be familiar to readers of our new page. We use very similar facilities that are installed there. But the point of the e-book format is to have it all nicely together, in a very book-like form. Something to read on your PC, your tablet or your mobile phone.
Perhaps older users will recognize from where some of the stories came, which articles they were inspired by. But in most cases, the original articles were posted before many of our potential readers were even born. Others can view them nostalgically as part of a collection they are glad to possess.
You can read the introduction to Frederic's Chess Tales here
1 Introduction
2 The beautiful Behting
3 Darkness on the Horizon
4 Puzzles on a train
5 Alekhine's Best Games
6 1983: Thirteen super-grandmasters!
7 The handshake challenge
8 How God plays chess
9 Reconstructing Turing's "Paper Machine”
10 Nigel Short and the chess player's brain
11 Alex Roshal and the Great Russian Chess Joke
12 Almira! Chess, poker and soccer
13 The Sicilian Vespers
14 The wrong bishop
15 Chess puzzles – easy and fun
16 Chess Madness
17 April chess pranks
18 Love interests of chess players
19 East German programmers in Budapest
20 The Great King Walk
You can buy Frederic's Chess Tales in our Shop, and then access it from your devices. The price is a modest €9.90. Try it out – there is more to come.
Interesting and entertaining stories and pictorials around chess. Studies and problems, and how amateurs and world world-class players react to them.
