A ChessLecture Update

After many years of not changing very much, ChessLecture.com is really starting to try some new ideas this year, and I think it’s a great thing. They are releasing many of the older series of lectures as DVD’s, and posting some of the lectures on the new YouTube site. I think I mentioned the YouTube site once before when it only had one video on it. But now there are several videos available, and so you can get a really good sample of the style of the different ChessLecturers.

The videos uploaded so far are from the following series:

• Positional Chess by FM Valeri Lilov
• Nimzo-Indian Patterns by IM Bryan Smith
• A Secret Weapon for Black (Scandinavian Defense) by IM Bill Paschall
• Slav Defense with 4. … a6 by GM Leonid Kritz
• Smyslov Endgames by GM Jesse Kraai
• Tactical Motifs by yours truly
• Learn from Your Fellow Amateurs by yours truly
• 50 Years of Tal-Botvinnik by GM Jesse Kraai
• Learn from the World Champions by FM Dennis Monokroussos

In each case, what’s on the YouTube site is just one lecture out of a series, and to see the rest you would have to get the DVD or become a member of ChessLecture.com.  If you like these nine lectures, just imagine having 2000 more to select from! That’s what you get when you join ChessLecture.com, even for just one month.

Also, ChessLecture.com has a Facebook page now, which will be useful for subscribers because every day they give a capsule description of the new lecture for that day. And there is also an e-mail newsletter each week that gives a synopsis of all five new lectures for the week. I think that all of these changes are moving toward a very desirable goal of making the site more interactive.

I believe ChessLecture also has a Twitter feed now, but I long ago decided that I have no interest in Twitter, so I’ll have to let you explore that for yourself.

This is a complete change of subject, but I also have some off-topic news to pass along. The paperback version of my book, The Universe in Zero Words, has now come out! This is pretty exciting to me because it’s the first time I’ve written a hardback that has gone to paperback.

A lot of people never even buy hardbacks. I used to be one of them, before I became a professional writer. My viewpoint was: Why pay extra, sometimes a lot extra, for a cloth binding, when all I really care about are the words inside? What I didn’t realize was that most hardbacks never come out in paperback. By buying only paperbacks, I was missing out on three-quarters of the books published, and basically letting the market decide what I should and should not be able to read. For example, my first book, The Big Splat, never went to paperback because it didn’t sell quite enough. (The publisher told me it needed to sell 8000 copies. To date, it has only sold 7500.)

Anyway, the good news is that you now have your choice of formats for The Universe in Zero Words, and if you were waiting for the paperback, wait no longer! Rush out to Amazon and buy your copy today!  😎

While I’m on off-topic news, let me also mention that later this month I will travel to Germany for the first time. The occasion is a meeting called the Heidelberg Laureate Forum, which will bring together about 80 winners of the most prestigious prizes in math and computer science with 200 talented younger mathematicians for a week of hobnobbing and brainstorming. I’ve actually signed on to write a blog during the event, which will I believe be cross-posted at www.scientificamerican.com. If you can imagine getting 80 Nobel laureates together in a meeting with 200 young scientists, or 80 grandmasters together with 200 top junior players, you can see why I am excited about this event.

I’m debating whether I should cross-post any of my Heidelberg blog entries here. Maybe we could call this blog “dana blogs math” for a week.  What do you think? They’ll all be about math and computer science, not chess, so I have to think they would not be all that interesting for the audience of this blog. So perhaps I won’t do it. But in any case, don’t expect any chess posts here between September 20 and 28. Either there will be math, or there will be nothing.