Everymanchess books and ebooks forum

Some of my personal favourites;

Understanding the Grunfeld by Jonathan Rowson

or

Queens Gambit Declined - Matthew Sadler

but honourable mentions go to Aagaard's Dutch Stonewall (great introduction!), Neil McDonald's Starting out: The Dutch, the same author's Mastering the French, Tony Kosten's The Dynamic English, Sadler's The Slav and more recently the incredible work of Boris Avrukh, Grandmaster Repertoire Vol1, which is most probably the most deserving winner of a 'best opening book' award, it just isn't my own favourite as it's a bit beyond my current level and doesn't really fit my repertoire - I simply bought it because I use (as Black) some of the defences it discusses. Great book.

In no particular Order:

Alekhine's Defence by Cox
Mastering the Chess Openings by Watson (all three volumes)
The Queen's Gambit Declined by M. Sadler (a great presentation style)
The Chigorin Defence by Sverre (English Edition)
Win with the Stonewall Dutch by Sverre et al

Also in no particular order:

"Play the Semi-Slav" by David Vigorito
"Win with the Stonewall Dutch" by Sverre Johnsen & Ivar Bern
"King's Indian and Grunfeld: Fienchetto Lines" by Lasha Janjgava
"The Latvian Gambit Lives" by Tony Kosten
"The Ruy Lopez - A Guide for Black" by Sverre Johnsen & Lief Johannessen
"Play 1.e4 e5" by Nigel Davies
"1.d4" by Boris Avrukh
"Offbeat Spanish" by Glenn Flear (albeit outdated)

From the didactic point of view:

Starting out series: Accelerated Dragon, Alekhine, Scandinavian, Trompowsky, Sveshnikov.
New in chess books: The Black Lion, Flexible French, Dismantling the Sicilian, Chigoring.

From the point of view of the theory:

-Everymanchess "Play the" series: Play the Caro kann, Play Sicilian Kann...
- Quality Chess: The Sveshnikov Reloaded (Rogozenko), Marin´s e5, GM Series.
- Gambit: Play the Alekhine (Analysis of games+ Fritz, Rybka...)

Teory + didactic:
-Quality Chess: GM series
- The Complete Hedgehog (Shipov)

From the point of view of the marketing: Everymanchess books

The best books: Quality and Everyman
The worst books: Chess-stars and Gambit

Regards!

Dragadorf wrote:The best books: Quality and Everyman
The worst books: Chess-stars and Gambit

Regards!

Uhm....NO!

From a "quantity" perspective, I have more everyman books than any other publisher. From a satisfaction perspective, it ranks 4th of 6.

In order of rank, from best to worst:

1. Quality Chess - Format is excellent! Amount of analysis is excellent! Paper quality and binding is superb! Completeness is Top Notch! There isn't a better publishing company than this one for chess books!

2. Gambit - Format is easy to read. Analysis is deep in most areas. Plenty of advanced-level books, and those that are reportoire books (like the Stonewall Dutch book that came out Spring of 2009) are more complete and in-depth than the "Starting Out" hoopla that have overtaken Everyman.

3. Russell (I think that's what they are called, the one with the Black Knight head on the binder that published the book on the Modern Morra gambit and the Scandinavian with 3...Qd6 book) - Format is easy to read. Theory can be a little dense in these books with not much explanation, but again, I'm not looking for books that a beginner should be reading. I rank it third because the books published are meant for a specific group, experts or above, and doesn't cover the whole spectrum.

4. Everyman - The publishing company seems to worry more about page count than anything else. You don't see Gambit having 80% of their books being the same length. You don't see authors saying that they curbed their analysis due to space other than maybe massive volume books, like the Watson books on openings, which are meant to be high level (I have Volume 3, which covers the English). If you look at Everyman from when they took over Cadogan, the first 5 years, at least 9 of every 10 books were exactly 144 pages in length. Then magic numbers like 160, 176, and 192 started appearing. Only recently have they published longer books, which seemed to start around the time of "Play the French" (3rd edition). These books were full of holes, and each one had all of these booklength excuses for leaving stuff out, or putting in sneer comments like (paraphasing) "In this book, I'm going to teach you how to, well, play the Queen's Gambit. Ok, that was a little obnoxious, sorry about that." What is this? 70's British Comedy? Or chess? Formatting and Quality have gone HORRIBLY SOUTH. The Starting Out series, diagrams are paired in 2's with the first referenced at the bottom of that page (usually), and the 2nd referenced a half to a full page later. Why should a diagram that refers to text near the bottom of page 30 be placed half-way down page 29? Also, around 2008, the quality has taken a nose dive. Compare the quality of the paper in say, Play the French (3rd Edition) to the quality of the Play 1.b4 book, or the book on the King's Indian Saemisch. Also, Everyman seems to use some type of sealant or some plastic item on the cover of the book, and I have a few where that sealant is seperating from the cover of the book at the edge. Quite annoying. Never had a book from another publisher do that other than 1 book from the 90's on the Modern King's Indian Attack (red cover) and have at least 5 to 10 from Everman do that. Notes in books are extremely light also. Instead of explaining the idea of the move played, it gives 3 moves of a line that obviously doesn't work. Let's say you have 4 legitimate options. One gives White the advantage, One gives White only equality, One is a positional blunder for White, only realized 14 moves later, and One is an obvious loss of a piece in 3 moves. What Everyman will do is publish the correct move played, and give the obvious blunder (must be another space thing, huh?), whereas Gambit and Quality won't give that junk, they'll explain why option B is only equal, showing the 3 magical moves for Black each 5 moves apart from one another, and show that 15 moves later, with best moves by White thereafter, it's only equal, and then also show that the other option loses because of a spectacular sequence for Black. Stuff like that forces you to think more in depth. Showing the obvious is like "ok, DUH!"

5. Chess Stars - Everyman has FAR MORE PROBLEMS than Chess Stars, but Chess Stars ranks lower because of the severity of their problems. For example, take the books on the GM games collections of certain GMs that take up multiple volumes. The printing is horrible. Faded in places, etc. I have the 2 books on Botvinnik. Also, if you want a complete list of his games that you don't have scoresheets for, print a list in the back. Don't just scatter about the full-length header, with tournament, round, players, etc, and then waste space saying that the score is not available, and then just list 1:0, or 0:1, or 1/2:1/2. Take some of the earlier tournaments, and you have 5 games in a row with no score, and an entire column is cluttered with this junk. Also, I own the book on the Safest Sicilian, the Opening for White according the Kramnik series (the original 5, not 1A and 1B), and the book on the Anti-Meran. The Anti-Meran one is ok, but the other 2 don't seem to be organized very well, and are hard to follow.

6. Batsford (Changed names many times, don't recall what they are called now) - Back in the heyday of the 90s, with the 2-book series by Nunn on the Main Line King's Indian, they were great. However, they took a huge nosedive. Some books they publish are just complete garbage (i.e. Gary Lane's book on the Ruy Lopez). In addition, around the time of the Gary Lane book just referenced, from then onward, have you seen a book published by them? Ever see the amount of White Space? It's almost like writing a term paper in college with 3-inch top, bottom, left, and right margins, triple spaced, just so you can meet the minimum length requirement. Come on guys. I deserve what I pay for. Not 50% white space.


Well, there you have it. Everyman is Number 4 of 6 in the Chess Publishing business.


All in all, here's my thought about each publisher:

Quality - Two Thumbs Up - I have yet to see a bad book.
Gambit - Two Thumbs Up - A "tad" below Quality, but still up there. A few select books are sour grapes.
Russell - One Thumb Up - Decent, though not intended for those under 2000 in my humble opinion.
Everyman - One Thumb Up in 2000, at least One Thumb Down 2008-2010.