Brand new: ChessBase Tutorials
Experts estimate that more books have been written about chess than about all other games combined. Chess addicts may own hundreds, but have an ambivalent relationship to them. On the one hand, one is proud to own the books. On the other, most cannot be read! Not by 95% of the people who buy them. ChessBase is currently in the process of launching a new "Tutorial" format. First volumes can be purchased in our Shop. Check out the new interactive ebook format which you can play it out on the board and also enlarge photos, watch videos. Photo: ChessBase
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's 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
And here are the contents of the book
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.
About the Author
Editor-in-Chief emeritus of the ChessBase News page. Studied Philosophy and Linguistics at the University of Hamburg and Oxford, graduating with a thesis on speech act theory and moral language. He started a university career but switched to science journalism, producing documentaries for German TV. In 1986 he co-founded ChessBase.
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Ding Liren in Hamburg
@ 09/02/2024 by Frederic Friedel (en) |
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Super-talents and the secret of success
@ 27/10/2023 by Frederic Friedel (en) |
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The most valuable chess guestbook ever
@ 17/08/2023 by Sneha Tiwari (en) |
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The Chess Handshake Challenge
@ 14/08/2020 by Frederic Friedel (en) |
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The Friedel Chronicles Part II - The bohemian Tal, the courteous Spassky, and the heretic Fischer!
@ 04/04/2020 by Satanick Mukhuty (en) |
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The Friedel Chronicles Part I - Tales of the nonpareil chess raconteur
@ 28/03/2020 by Satanick Mukhuty (en) |
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Frederic Friedel in India - Part I
@ 18/03/2019 by Frederic Friedel (en) |