Tony...I wish you the best. I was also whining over the delay earlier but I now understand how difficult it is to write an opening book nowadays. Also GM:s complain over that (hard work) too.Its a huge task. So work calmly and methodically ...no stress and its gonna be fine in the end.

Good luck.

But back to the ranch. With the upper end of the product line.
Come on Tony, Christmas never comes? Your friends and customers are excited and waiting!

Only four Cyrus Lakdawala books in the next year? That can't be right.

Glad you're excited! 

I'm not sure what the Everyman business strategy is regarding the eBooks. It might be demand, it might be that they rush to convert their best sellers, or it might be that they wait until sales of the paper copy slow down enough to warrant selling them in their eBook forms.

I know that you can request titles be made into eBooks on the Everyman forums, but I'm not sure how active they are these days.

Let me know if you have any other questions. 

Hi Tony,

Great point about the 'pruning' -- I haven't really ever got with ...f5 stuff properly, but I'm looking forward to doing so!

At present my roadmap consists of a bizarre-looking pen-and-pencil sprawl, some of it barely legible even by me! I'm aiming to get rid of all the lines just by using a number key. I'll probably manage to do that over the next week or so, then if I've been able to do it in say MS Word I'll send you a Word attachment, and if it's still handwritten I'll try to scan it as a PDF or something! (Edit. Of course, this raises the question, what software draws nice trees? ChessBase doesn't, much as I like it for position searches! I'll have a look on some other threads ...)

I have not the slightest difficulty understanding why it’s taking Tony a while to get finished – writing a book on the Kalashnikov is a truly phenomenal undertaking!

So I wouldn’t be coming to the book cold, I recently embarked on an attempt to sort out the transpositional possibilities in the 6 c4 Kalashnikov, which, as McDonald (1995, p. 71) says, are ‘mind-bending’. What I’ve been doing is taking three initial 6 c4 ‘tabiyas’ --

(1) 6 …Be7 7 N1c3 a6 8 Na3 Nf6
(2) 6 …Be7 7 N1c3 a6 8 Na3 Be6
(3) 6 …Be6 7 N1c3 a6 8 Na3 Rc8

-- plus the major 6 ...Be7 7 Be2 and 7 Bd3 lines that inter-transpose with these three, and trying to produce a flow-chart representing important ‘consequent tabiyas’ to which these initial ones lead. I knew this was going to be complicated, but I had no idea just how complicated! For the moment I’ve omitted all …f5 stuff, plus, in the various …Bg5 variations, I’ve only included lines where Black plays …Nf6 iso …Nge7 (or …Qg5), and I’ve still generated over 20 ‘consequent tabiyas’! -- some, admittedly, much more theoretically important than others, but all useful for learning.  (To be supplemented, if I ever get round to it, by a massive apparatus of notes!)

I wonder how many other openings are as transposition-rich as the Kalashnikov. It’s so complex in this respect that producing a useful publishable flow-chart, at least one employing a system of lines, is at the limits of practical possibility. But for most openings this isn’t the case and I find it hard to understand why chess books don’t, where appropriate, use this method, i.e. a chart in the front or back of the book with multiple arrows leading, via the different possible move orders, to important positions keyed to pages in the text. This would certainly hinder authors from discussing the same position twice in different chapters, as in Pinski and Aagaard’s otherwise interesting 2001 book!

Thanks for clarifying matters, Tony! 

Now we Europeian Kalash-addicts will have to wait for June and the publishing of your masterpiece 

Like I said, I`m for one is really looking foreward to it. Thx again. 

Ben