MW wrote on 05/12/19 at 02:41:57:

I dont think it has anything to do with publishers not wanting to give away review copies. The cost of doing so with a well placed reviewer will be worth more than the cost of that book (most books these days are fairly good, so it should be fairly straightforward to get a reasonably good review if sent to a reviewer).

It's probably more to do with a cost/time requirement on behalf of those writing or publishing the reviews and the decline of websites that used to publish them (they were often tied into magazines or shops trying to boost sales of books & DvDs etc that have either since closed or restricted the reviews to their print/digital formats as paid content).

For example, British Chess Magazine used to publish the reviews online as well as in it's magazines (I think New In Chess used to do the same)- now they are only in the magazines. The week in chess used to have reviews by John Watson - but they lost their sponsorship from Chess & Bridge and so probably couldnt afford them any longer (all though they had become fairly sporadic even if by then).

Silman hasnt updated his website in a couple of years - and I'm sure if the likes of Silman, Donaldson & Watson asked a publisher for a review copy then they would be likely to get one.

@Proustiskeen writes reviews, and is probably one of the few reliable reviewers out there.

In short - there isnt much money to be made from writing/publishing reviews - and some books require deep knowledge of the subject to review well.

I posted sometime ago about how this place is slow....only to have Tony Kosten think I was complaining about server speed. LOL.

Some of the comments are doubtless correct, like the same questions over and over, lack of credit for analysis, no interaction with GM contributors, database and engine proliferation.

But.....at least for me this place was just over moderated. Too much nitpicking over things like font and keeping things "positive" ...lol. We're chess players... Then there's the over complicated board format. It was much simpler and better before. Much ado about nothing, really.

I couldn't really get my questions answered readily and I always felt like I was pulling teeth. But yeah, lots of space for the King's Gambit!! lol

It's a shame really. Good book reviews and independent analysis seems to be in very short supply. There used to be Bauer, regular Watson, Silman, Kenilworthian, Chessvibes, Sverre Johnsen, free master videos from chessvideostv, ....now it's practically down to an occasional youtube video from a master and John Elburg's reviews.

How the hell am I supposed to decide on a purchase??

gsgs wrote on 09/11/18 at 08:06:53:


This ebbs and flows, the Forum is always less popular in the summer.

some being "rude" and such is not the problem.
We are used to it in internet, at least it creates reactions.

The problem is low traffic, no responses at all.

Well May english is not very good but I will try to explain myself. Some people get angry when you make “silly” questions. What opening is better, how can I get better, caro vs sicilian etc. Most people (including me) we’ll make that type of questions. When you troll them you are killing the fórum. May humble opinion.

trw wrote on 09/02/17 at 18:04:04:


Really, please say who it was, or at least which opening, I'm really curious.

What was most important for me to post were my thoughts about training and psychology. There was good feedback and what's new now in my mind are only details. Additionally the critics of the Kotov model of move generation are common knowledge and in the books written by far stronger players.

This was in the general section. In the openings I could not contribute good stuff. There I'm a grateful reader what holds for several members in the general section too.

Then there are some health issues taking a lot of power.

barnaby wrote on 05/16/17 at 21:12:31:


First of all, I think engines have improved at such a rapid clip that it is getting much harder to correct them then it used to be. Back when I started posting here, very little effort was required to find holes in the engines. These days, I can spend days often to find tiny improvements over what the engine recommends.

This has led I feel to an increase in people even top level GMs blindly follow the engines. Indeed, the reactions I get from class players and masters alike at the reaction to my playing high level correspondence is: "Why? Like you just follow the engine right?" Indeed, I do not. Which brings me to my point, perhaps there is a way to engage the other high level correspondence players that don't follow the engines blindly. A way to make the conversations focus more deeply on spots the engines have yet to understand (which is usually the opening!). And most importantly, bring deep verbiage to explaining ideas and concepts in openings within our community which is something the engines can never do.


ErictheRed wrote on 07/03/17 at 00:31:19:


I am guilty of this myself. I went back and read this entire thread. It took me awhile to pin point why exactly I drifted off. I guess it was due to a particular author who took a ton of analysis I produced on this very website and made an entire chapter of his book out it. I was never credited. I certainly didn't receive any monetary compensation. Sure, I have an easy lawsuit but I am not one interested in that. Yes, in the front of the book under sources, he listed "Chesspublishing.com and forums" which is as close as he got to admitting an entire 40 pages of his book was written by someone else on this forum. After this, I pretty much lost my taste for posting my analysis. Not consciously mind you, I wasn't really aware this incident was affecting me so much... but truly why would I post if my work will be lifted for commercial gain of another with zero credit to my hard work and years of testing my ideas in correspondence? This is different from the argument Nakamura and Kamsky regularly make about someone publishing a book about the players. They are not able to get the player's comments, analysis and thoughts without those players. Here, the author did just that. Anyways, the end result was I became fairly inactive and took roughly a 3 year break from posting (tho not moderating and silently lurking).

As to what eventually brought me back, the issue is two fold. First, I am interested in making a strong push again to improve myself and largely considered my discussions here with MNB and Markovich (RIP) to be a large part of my rapid improvement.

Second, I met an individual while traveling that I got into several interesting discussions with over the course of a tournament. I forget which night it was but perhaps the 3rd or 4th night with this man, we got to talking about external free resources of high quality. I mentioned chesspub forums. He said he already used them and asked my username. When I responded, he said "Oh! I have been reading your posts for years! They have helped me so much! Let me buy you a drink!" Tbh, this caught me rather flat footed. Undoubtedly, I would not be shocked to hear such a remark about Markovich but about myself... I hadn't really thought it possible and this was high praise indeed.

Keano wrote on 08/23/17 at 01:46:27:



Agreed!!

GMTonyKosten wrote on 08/20/17 at 12:33:00:

In 2014 http://kenilworthian.blogspot.de/2014/09/the-end-of-chess-blogging.html already wrote that professional writers made amateurs increasingly irrelevant. So I am not at all surprised that the professional chesspub writers are doing much better than the amateur writers of the forum.
In general people believe that the more you pay, the more quality you can get. I see this behavior also around me. My opponents buy expensive books but don't read the free published analysis on my blog which I use against them to score some easy points. 2 of my most recent articles contain examples about this phenomenon see
http://chess-brabo.blogspot.de/2017/08/the-open-games.html
http://chess-brabo.blogspot.de/2017/08/matches.html
This season I even beated my own captain/president/20 year teammate, former belgian champion with a refutation which was published on my blog. In the post-mortem I just gave him the link to the article.
If you encounter such experiences then I very well understand why amateur-writers give up. However things are not all negative. There are still every day dozens or even hundreds of visitors interested in non-professional posts or articles. I notice this at the statistics of my blog but also by strangers regularly telling me that they follow my articles. So I refuse to accept that there is no place on the internet anymore for amateurs.

I agree with the concern.  In the "old days", there were forum members who were interested in engaging in debates about theory above and beyond the basic questions of repertoire, impressions of latest book and how do I improve?  This forum was a big influence to me as I rejoined competitive chess toward the tail end of my business career.  I was drawn in by people like the late  Mark "Markovich" Morss (and many others like MNb, Ametanoitos (Ntirlis), ErictheRed, etc...) who had strong opinions and were willing to back them up.

I recently posted on the French thread about trends in the Tarrasch partly in response to this thread about the forum.  I was "secretly" hoping to stimulate some more substantial discussion about the variation by putting a few of my own observations out there and seeing if anyone wanted to engage.  As you will see if you look at the thread, we didn't get very far.

So, what to do?  Perhaps it's just a phase and new forum members will join and add to the activity and content.  An idea that occurred to me would be to have the moderators play a more active role and suggest a current game or tabyia (ideally with a question(s) to focus responses) each month for input and discussion by forum members.  Then if the GM/IM writer for that section could cover it in their monthly update, it might increase forum activity while still providing an incentive for members to subscribe to the main site to see the GM/IM "final verdict."   This may be impractical or should be done less frequently than monthly, but it would be interesting to try if there was sufficient support particularly by the moderators.  Just a thought.... 

Reverse wrote on 08/18/17 at 09:59:58:


I imagine he advertised the main ChessPublishing.com site, rather than this Forum?
We do some advertising for the main site, probably not enough, though.

RoleyPoley wrote on 07/21/17 at 20:36:27:


OK, I've stickied it, thanks

Keano wrote on 07/21/17 at 23:35:10:


Just to clarify, I have no issue when a respected, (titled also helps) member posts engine analysis. An "engine warrior" would be a class-type player with little understanding of the game relying excessively on the engines and claiming to be an automatic expert analyst. 

On engine warriors I think people in general need to avoid decalarations such as this line is "just nothing", "just a dead draw", etc. I have noticed a strange type of poster crop up, no names obviously. But this type of stuff, with little respect for the game, does discourage genuine posters from contributing.

Jesse Gersenson wrote on 07/08/17 at 14:05:45:


It usually works fine, the only problem i've noticed is that my android can't load the posted games/analysis at all. I don't visit all that often so not a biggie, but maybe others have the same problem?

I don't think that we have a lot of "engine warriors," I personally meant more that since people have engines at their disposal at home, they're less inclined to start a thread when they can 1) switch on their own engines, and 2) think that many other people are just going to switch on their own engines when they respond to a thread.  I don't think that we need "engine warriors" for strong engines to have discouraged discussion.

I'm calling bull. This thread for instance

http://www.chesspub.com/cgi-bin/chess/YaBB.pl?num=1497181073/0

doesn't contain any analysis. No engine warrior in sight.
And there are many more threads like that one.

barnaby wrote on 07/18/17 at 18:22:37:


And, if you don't eat right you could suffer indigestion... 

All I'm saying is that a possible cure for the engine variation dumpers would be to request *some* verbal explanations. Of course, excessive explanations with no concrete analysis is not desirable at all.

A good chess book is one that explains some the thinking and plans behind the moves. I don't mean explanations expressed in an annoying, cloyingly basic way, but on a higher level. Chess engines can't really do that.

A few years ago, a friend of mine (a class player) had trouble facing the Exchange French while playing Black and I offered to help, even though I'm not a big time French player. With the help of the database, I suggested a plan based on Bd6 and Ne7, aiming for imbalances and more ambitious play instead of playing the standard symmetric Nf6 lines. I put together a basic repertoire for him, with some minimal wordage and mostly lines, but also warning against some traps involving Bxh7 after Black's Bg4.

My stuff was adequate, but then after a little while I got a hold of Uhlmann's book on the French and what a delight it was reading it. A great balance between variations and spelled-out plans, but I was most pleasantly surprised to see Uhlmann playing the line with Bd6/Ne7.

Today's chess computers are stronger than Uhlmann but can't  do a good job of distilling info, let alone explain plans well and  reveal the deeper ideas behind the moves, and can't even do that at my level, much less a GM's.

We need a balanced approach and we're poorer for it if we don't stop to try to explain at least to ourselves what we're trying to accomplish when playing chess moves.

ErictheRed wrote on 07/18/17 at 03:17:18:


I'm only suggesting that a way to deter dumping of dry computer analysis by some posters would be to ask them to provide some ideas as well. When that's not forthcoming, the embarrassment could keep them from continuing the practice.

(Not sure how much of a problem this has been lately.)

Nickajack wrote on 07/18/17 at 00:59:51:

But there's no universal view of how much explanation is wanted or needed. What seems blindingly obvious to you might need lots of explanation to me, and vice versa. Overexplained analysis can be just as annoying to read as underexplained analysis...

I honestly think the balance between variations and explanation in the forum is fine. If anything, more concrete analysis (using both engines and human brains!) would be great, since general considerations and the best laid plans can be ruined by one strong tactical move. But I can't really demand more analysis from others; I should start by contributing more of it myself first.

Göran wrote on 07/07/17 at 22:27:44:

I agree, but I am interested in others' opinions. Maybe I should just return to the previous order?

ErictheRed wrote on 07/15/17 at 05:51:20:



If it was scientifically possible to agree more than 100% I would.

There have been many instances in the past in which I have posted pragmatic lines in various openings only to have the thread grind to a halt once best play from the engine was introduced.

One thing I learned is that this site seem (?) to cater (?) to a lot of correspondence players of which use an engine during actual play) and these types of players are not going to eschew their engine-assisted analysis or slum in a pragmatic otb line that offers chances due to complications that are difficult for a human to navigate.


So, while I agree both philosophically and empirically with your statement I am more persuaded by the idea that the engine genie is not going back into the bottle and as such have pretty much stopped posting any theory related threads (here or elsewhere) because of such experiences of having the engine brigade take over the process.

I miss the local five & dime, landlines, the neighborhood bowling alley and coffee that costs 25 cents a cup and none of them are coming back.

The internets and engines have changed chess in ways that are not so easy to dial back, and they have even more changed how we talk about it, both here online and in real world situations.

ErictheRed wrote on 07/15/17 at 05:51:20:


+2.00

ErictheRed wrote on 07/13/17 at 23:58:39:


The crux of the matter.

One thing that deters many of the people I know from this forum is the heavy emphasis on the 'pure theory'. I mean, of course, theoretical disputes are essential and interesting, but many players are not correspondance players or GMs and are rebutted to read pages of lines of 40 moves depths. Strategical discussions about not only lines and TN but interesting positions, manoeuvers, exchanges, related endgames, etc.  all are important. Unfortunately, most of the time here, these last topics do not find many contributors.

Mate-in-1 captcha! Wow, yeah let's add that.

If we're lucky, lichess will have an api we could use, otherwise we need to get their playable chessboards working (on the forum) in order to have such a captcha.

No problems on mobile for me, either (HTC Android). 

I'm on holiday and not around much at the moment, but I'm glad that this discussion seems to have sparked some productive changes and that Jesse's back on board!

I haven't been on this forum in 6 months. It looks like a different forum, the categories are out of place, and there is much more visual clutter. I feel like I'm returning to the position of an adjourned game, and the pieces have been moved?!

Key elements of the forum software are broken: search, login. When I tried searching for my name 'Jesse', the YaBB search found nothing. When I tried logging in my username and password weren't recognized, and couldn't recover my password. I had to write Tony, asking him to manually reinstate me?!

My joining this forum, and leaving this forum, coincided with my participation in OTB tournament chess. I returned today at Tony's request for technical help.

We should re-open the registration process, adding a 'captcha' to thwart spam bots. Trolls will register, so a mechanism is needed to identify them and lock their accounts.

The YaBB search feature could be replaced with something more capable. Solr is my first thought, perhaps there is a Solr->YaBB integration.

A question for people who browse this forum with their mobile phone - is it easy to read this forum from you mobile phone?

Is it only me that is confused with the new sorting? Feel like General and General should change places. Only because I am not used to it yet??

LeeRoth wrote on 07/01/17 at 17:41:37:

There's one little snag. When I noticed that this forum slowed down I tried exactly this.
And got exactly zero response.
Perhaps you were too tired?

I've added a new board for recent tournaments, and I've reordered everything - is it better? Any comments, positive or negative, would be most welcome!

OK, I will add a new section and re-order the sections (General Chess first, then Openings?).
Any suggestions for the new section's name (Tournaments, Recent Events,...)? Anyone willing to Moderate PM me, please.

ErictheRed wrote on 07/03/17 at 16:37:23:


Sounds like a good idea, anyone against? I can set it up and then move all the older tournament threads over from General Chess.

Well the corollary question would be: can we (or Tony) do anything that would encourage members to post more?  This doesn't have to be a fruitless discussion.

Speaking of the current big events, it might be nice to have an area of the forums devoted exclusively to current events.  Someone like Tony could just start a thread at the beginning of a big tournament to encourage people to discuss.  This is on sub-forum that I'd be in favor of!

Because it takes work.  Or guts.  Or time.  If you post some analysis, there's a good chance it will go unanswered.  But ask people which way they point their Knights, and the members are happy to chime in.  The forum tracks how many times a post is viewed.  Lots of people are reading the posts, they just don't respond to them. 

Respectfully, its not a question of "why," it's a question of willingness.  We all have individual reasons why we might not post for a while.  But on the whole, the forum is what, we, the members make it.  We're not paying for this content.  There's no paid professional out there to create content for us while we all sit back and passively consume.  We need to create the content for ourselves. 

You want to spruce up the place a bit, that's fine.  I'm in favor.  But making cosmetic changes or improving the search function doesn't do anything to solve the fundamental lack of analysis problem.  And sprucing up the place won't do anything at all if people aren't willing to particpate in the first place. 

We need just all need to get back to doing that again.

LeeRoth wrote on 07/01/17 at 17:41:37:


Very good. But you getting tired of the discussion doesnt really mean anything. And your statements either.

Some very good points have been raised here by various members and we should really continue the discussion.

@tony good to here we may get the google site search back.

on the sub forums I strongly believe they are a negative but I have an open mind. I can see the advantage if there was heavy traffic. But without that, and google site search available, cannot really see the attraction. Bottom line is there are way too many negatives than positives on that.

ErictheRed wrote on 06/28/17 at 16:26:07:

I get more tired of reading the same answers over and over and over...

Where is the FAQ? On chesspub it could consist almost entirely of "What's a good line for a(n) (lazy | ambitious) , (positional | tactical) player against xyz opening?" and the followup, "What's the best (book | dvd | web resource)?". Yes, I know the answer to the second one should just be "chesspub", but it still gets asked a lot. (* see below)

Then we could go back to the future, answering the newbie questions with the snarky RTFM.

(* thinking some more on this) One of the problems with a paywall is that people on the other side don't know what they are missing. The FAQ might be a good place to give a truncated line, saying something like "our GM covered this line in an update, giving x games." You could also mention a critical move out of the blue (no context). People who know about the critical move will understand that it is covered, and want the update. People who don't know about the critical move will buzz about the internet asking "what is the line they are talking about on chesspub?".

One thought: I don't know that it would lead to more use, but some "stickied" threads in certain areas might help.  For instance, for those oft-asked questions such as "how do I get better at chess?" or "how do I learn to play the Sicilian?".  It would take some work, but some of those older threads could be combined and stickied to the top of the relevant forums, so that newcomers don't come and start new threads every year or so.

IsaVulpes wrote on 06/28/17 at 13:11:10:


Yes, I agree and I'm happy to do this, although I don't think it would change anything either.

katar wrote on 06/28/17 at 15:05:11:

While this works to a certain extend,
1) It really illustrates how bad the forum search truly is, when one is told to search on Google instead
2) It is missing features of a normal forum search, such as only looking into certain subfora, or only searching for posts by a certain user - both of which exist on the forum, but due to the strange limitation of 15 results maximum, it's barely functional - similarly, one can find "Recent Posts" by certain user without a search string (which doesn't work in the normal search) via their profile, but again.. it's limited to the 25 most recent ones, which makes it considerably less useful than it could be.

From chesspub.com I tend to go straight for the "most recent posts" menu without thinking. Usually I can understand what most of the posts/threads are about by connecting the dots with what I've seen previously.

But the value of this way of doing it depends on how often you check the forum. Arguably too often in my case, to the point that I'm slightly annoyed when I realize there have been more than 25 posts since my last visit!

I really should spend some more time on hard chess training instead.

ErictheRed wrote on 06/28/17 at 16:26:07:

I agree with everybody here that the built-in forum search is virtually useless. How about just adding a button/function for Google site search? But this might cost money; I'm not sure how it works.

Two suggestions:
1. Agree with the suggestion to bookmark the link to recent topics:
http://www.chesspub.com/cgi-bin/chess/YaBB.pl?action=recenttopics;display=25

2. Use any search engine to search the forum:
site:chesspub.com *
(replace * with any search string, like "dilworth" for example)
http://www.bing.com/search?q=site%3Achesspub.com%20dilworth
I will mention that searches are not as necessary due to the subforum organization.

I think nowadays folks rely on opening repertoire books/videos which are increasing in both quality and frequency of production.  There is no longer any need to ask forum members about move orders in the Scheveningen.  Instead, questions refer to some recent Scheveningen book/video by another vendor.  I have noticed that, it seems, most of the threads/comments here refer to an outside opening repertoire product rather than a self-contained question or discussion: the forum is becoming a website of book/dvd reviews.  I would like chesspublishing to curate "repertoires" by packaging critical games for a given opening system and selling the packages in some manner or another - perhaps with a subscription/update term.  I suspect every subscriber already does this work, manually.

Finally, big thanks go to Grandmaster Tony Kosten.  I find it humbling and amusing that a famous grandmaster and author cares so much about catering to chess peons like me.

Here's my 50 cents on the matter, as a former frequent poster:

I think I gradually lost interest due to 1) deja vu all over again, the same kind of topics would be brought up again and again - the longer you been here the more you recognise from before... 2) lack of response when I posted or replied 3) the new subfora making it harder to see what's new. The most recent post in each section got hidden while the old and odd were listed in plenty, giving the impression that nothing was happening...

Perhaps the forum needs to adjust to the times - nowadays players are reluctant to give away analysis/ideas since they want to use it first and if it works why draw attention to it... Which results in more newbie question and stuff like "this weird move wins" posts.

I haven't been following the debate regularly for a couple of years, but before that I got the impression that the most prolific and interesting threads were about chess history, new rules, cheating scandals, FIDE, World Championship Matches, and the theory debates that took off were usually part of a recent book thread or about openings one wouldn't expect to face on a tournament level - the latter gave rise to a lot of amazing creativity!

Keano wrote on 06/27/17 at 23:22:41:


There is absolutely no data to support this assertion, as far as I can see. There was no drop-off in visits after the changes, and the Forum activity is currently very high for the time of year (Forum visits hit their peak around December time, and are much less in the Summer months.)
Removing the sub-sections is very unlikely to change the frequentation, and will just take us back to a time when it was difficult to find older messages.

What I get from this is that there are some expert forum trackers who have their methods.

But lets be honest, 99% of us are not going into RSS  or whatever else. If we need to get back on track those sub-forums need to go.

I never really understood the change - there is the old saying " if it aint broke dont fix it"

ErictheRed wrote on 06/23/17 at 04:07:57:


Actually I have the link http://www.chesspub.com/cgi-bin/chess/YaBB.pl?action=recenttopics;display=10 in my browser startup so that the first thing I see in the morning is the 10 latest posts.

ErictheRed wrote on 06/23/17 at 04:07:57:


But there are blue circles for the sub-sections too, so that I know if there is a new post in an opening that interests me (say, the Najdorf) or that doesn't interest me (the Scheveningen).
I can see that this seems to be very much a question of taste, it's a pity we can't have both Forum systems at the same time!

ErictheRed wrote on 06/22/17 at 17:07:06:


If this occurs then you can simply PM me and I will ban them for a period if necessary.