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Hot Topic (More than 10 Replies) Forward Chess (Read 2935 times)
FreeRepublic
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Re: Forward Chess
Reply #10 - 01/31/21 at 14:59:11
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I bought the Exchange Queen's Gambit for Black by Tibor Karolyi from Forward Chess (FC). It is one of many fine titles available at FC. There are many games and variations. You can also analyze at the chess board with, or without, a chess engine.

A personal opinion is that it is not all about the opening. Simply playing through the annotated games, occasionally exploring sidelines on one's own, can help you to acquire a familiarity with the middle game. This process could not be easier.

I'm not aware of any way to enter comments or save analysis. Perhaps one plus is that you will never confuse your work with that of the author!

It takes only a little time to familiarize oneself with the interface. All in all, I rate FC highly. Many of their books can be found nowhere else in electronic form.
  
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MW
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Re: Forward Chess
Reply #9 - 12/30/20 at 08:16:09
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Thanks (LeeRoth) I'm going to give Forward Chess ago....there are a couple of books I really want and it appears Forward Chess is the only option at the moment...I've had a good look at their website and it doesn't look too hard even for an IT dinosaur like me.
  
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LeeRoth
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Re: Forward Chess
Reply #8 - 12/29/20 at 02:12:26
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@MW —

Why not try it?  You don’t have to buy anything. You can download the Forward Chess program and a sample book, True Lies in Chess, for free and try it out.

There are some nice benefits to using Forward Chess.  The books are cheaper, you can get them immediately, there are no shipping costs, and the ebooks don’t take up physical shelf space.  You also have a built in board—on which you can not only follow the text, but also move the pieces— which makes reading the books easier.  And there is an engine.

That said, I have to say that I still prefer reading a regular books to an ebook.  I just find it easier to read a regular book, and, for chess books in particular, I find regular print books allow me to get a feel for the book as a whole, to find particular variations, and to skip around or browse (which is basically how I read most chess books anyway).

But it’s a trade off.  Pros vs Cons.  And for me the benefits of the ebooks—price, no shipping, etc.—outweigh the disadvantages. 

Plus, as you use ebooks and get more used to them, the disadvantages start to diminish.  I went from hating ebooks, to tolerating them, to liking them, although it can sometimes depend on the book.  One thing that helped me was using an iPad or tablet that I could hold in my hand.  That makes a big difference for me, as I still won’t read an ebook on a laptop or desktop.
« Last Edit: 12/29/20 at 05:01:58 by LeeRoth »  
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MNb
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Re: Forward Chess
Reply #7 - 12/27/20 at 06:29:13
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MW wrote on 12/25/20 at 20:36:57:
just wonder how much space it would take for the app and if you download a book how much space that would use?

I have no idea about apps, because when it comes to modern IT stuff I'm living in the Stone Age as well. If downloading books takes too much space though there is a simple solution: use an external hard disk. Basically it works the same as a USB-stick, except that you won't carry it with you very often. Since many years I use one for my backups (in case my computer crashes). I just made a very rough calculation: I could store more than 100 000 books on it.
That said I prefer printed books too, but if that option becomes a headache storing electronic books should not be a problem.
  

The book had the effect good books usually have: it made the stupids more stupid, the intelligent more intelligent and the other thousands of readers remained unchanged.
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an ordinary chessplayer
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Re: Forward Chess
Reply #6 - 12/27/20 at 06:17:09
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Yes, well, how about being the Cowardly Lion? You could pick just *one* Forward Chess title, for example Dvoretsky's Endgame Manual -- can't have too many endgame books, and it's a good one. Or pick any title semi-randomly. See how it goes. If you don't like it, you are out one book. It's fine to be a luddite, but it's important to be an educated luddite.

I prefer physical books myself, but in the interest of scientific experiment I bought one or two titles for each of the digital platforms: Forward Chess, Gambit Chess, Everyman, New in Chess, Chess King, ChessBase, Kindle, roughly in that order. Did I forget any? Guess what, I didn't like any of them that much, but I did use the books and I really only regret one of the purchases. Even there I learned what to avoid. They are generally nice to have when travelling, e.g. I read the unmentionable author while flying for vacation.... Vacation. I just made myself sad. Sad
  
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MW
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Re: Forward Chess
Reply #5 - 12/27/20 at 03:24:07
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Thanks everyone you have been a great help....being the IT coward that I am after reading your responses I think I'll continue to buy printed books!

Generally I am able to get most titles through the Book Depository (BD). There is however, one publisher that I like a lot that uses Forward Chess but not the BD so I'll just have to hope that I can find away around that.

Thanks again, MW.
  
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cathexis
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Re: Forward Chess
Reply #4 - 12/26/20 at 18:23:17
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Personally, I would not chose the cloud and go to lengths to avoid it. It exposes one to the very things you mentioned. But I have the luxury of having a PC with a 225GB SSD and 1 TB internal along with 3 externals of roughly 3.6 TB total - all but one of them 90% full. But, the OP seemed to me to be looking for solutions with what he actually has, rather than a more optimal solution. I have no argument with your criticism of the cloud. I agree with it. It just doesn't sound like my solution (purchasing hardware, learning to better optimize and manage existing storage, paying for and exploiting a Prime membership for my own advantage, being lucky enough to live in the U.S.) were what MW was looking for. The best answer is not always the right answer. I hope MW takes your advice to heart when making up their mind what to do.
  
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an ordinary chessplayer
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Re: Forward Chess
Reply #3 - 12/25/20 at 23:30:21
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@cathexis - Don't get me started on "the cloud". Using an external service because you don't have enough local storage leaves you entirely at the mercy of the service provider when (not if) they change their terms. This happens ALL THE TIME, e.g., in no particular order, Google Drive, Flickr, Verizon, Sony, etc., etc. So far the changes in terms have always been detrimental to the end user, funny that. Cloud storage is not a good substitute for an offline backup. I could go on and on here, but I won't. Naturally I do use the cloud, Dropbox, iCloud, Sync, and others but I also backup ALL these files to an external hard drive.
  
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an ordinary chessplayer
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Re: Forward Chess
Reply #2 - 12/25/20 at 23:07:06
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Hi MW,
You don't need to download an app, this is just an option for you.Edited:
You do need to download an app, one for each device you want to use for the book.
(For some reason when I see "app" I think only of mobile, sorry about that.)
You can view the book on your computer, or having already paid once for the book, you can view the same book on your mobile.

You don't need to worry about the space consumed by a digital chess book. Although I can't say precisely the size of any digital chess book, it will on the order of 1 MB. To be conservative, say it is no more than 2 MB. Then 512 books would be 1 GB, and it's easy to see your 128 GB drive will not fill up with chess books any time soon.

That said, as a non-computer person you still need to worry a little about your SSD drive.
1. You can lose it. Your computer might be lost or stolen, or damaged by fire, flood, accident (spilling coffee on a laptop is surprisingly common), etc. These days a ransomware-attack is the most likely way to "lose" a hard drive.
2. It can fail. An SSD is quite hardy compared to a spinning disk, nevertheless there is still a small probability that it might fail.
3. It can fill up. 128 GB seems like an unimaginably big drive, but consider. I assume you are using Windows, so 20 GB will be taken by Windows as a Recovery Partition, therefore unavailable to you. Then the Windows operating system itself will need about 40 GB. That's half your drive right there, before you have added even one user file! Further, for efficient operation a hard drive needs about 50% free space! (Something to think about when shopping for your next computer.)
Edited:
Thinking about cloud storage made me think about another danger.
4. You might erase it. The classic one is the UNIX typo "$ rm / *" instead of "$ rm /*". I didn't do that one, but I did delete a project once when I answered wrongly at the "Are you sure?" prompt. (I was very tired.) Another time I dragged my network folder (mouse-slip) into someone else's network folder, but due to wrong permissions I could not move it back! Nor could I even look at it! It was said about chess, but applies to computers just as well: The mistakes are all there, waiting to be made.

It's particularly relevant because of the way cloud storage works. If your only copy is in the cloud, deleting a file means you may never get it back. If your cloud folder is synced automatically, deleting the local file also deletes it from the cloud. Some cloud providers also provide a backup, but doesn't that beg the question?


Your answer to all three (edit: now four) above problems is the same. You need to backup your hard drive. The method I use is a dead-simple one recommended in PC Magazine ages ago. Buy an external USB hard drive, create a backup folder on the external drive (e.g. backup_users_20201225) and drag your Users folder from the PC into the backup folder on the external drive. As for which drive, anything in the 1 TB to 5 TB size will be more than enough for now. If you outgrow it then just buy another one. Having more than one backup drive is also a good idea!
  
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cathexis
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Re: Forward Chess
Reply #1 - 12/25/20 at 23:03:13
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If I could not have books going into the future, my fallback would be Kindle, an Amazon product which has the option of keeping your "books" in the Cloud, a kind of virtual on-line storage not on your computer. This might help with your SSD issues, but may not solve all your problems for you.
  
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MW
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Forward Chess
12/25/20 at 20:36:57
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Would be interested in a little advice....because I'm an older  chess player to me the printed book has always been the way that I have studied the game. Problem is that living in the Southern Hemisphere postage and delivery times seem to be continuing to increase and often I'm being asked to pay more for postage/shipping than the actual cost of the book.

I do have some stuff via Chessable but where there is the option of either buying the book or using the Chessable format I've always gone for the book.

Because of the increased shipping costs I'm now looking at books on Forward Chess as another option. Problem is I'm not much of a computer man. I've looked at their site and browsed some sample pages etc on my HP Laptop which was easy enough.

However, the site talks about an app (which I didn't need to browse the sample pages) so I'm just wondering do I need to download this if I buy the actual book?

Which follows on to my next question...my computer is SSD which means the storage is limited (in my case 128GB) so I'm just wonder how much space it would take for the app and if you download a book how much space that would use?

Appreciate any guidance, but as I say I'm not a computer person so please keep the terminology and any explanations simple!

Many thanks
  
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