This week I submitted an article to Chess Life that was very closely based on my “Eight-Dimensional Chess” lecture on www.chesslecture.com. I’m glad to say that the editor liked it a lot. He said that the earliest slot for publication is in late spring or early summer, so that is probably when it will appear (assuming it is accepted). You heard about it here first!
He did suggest one change, though — he didn’t like the title “Eight-Dimensional Chess.” I agree that it sounds a little bit too academic. So I suggested the following title, which he loved: “Don’t Just Reassess Your Chess — IMPLODe It!” (Of course, the title is a reference to Silman’s How to Reassess Your Chess, plus the mnemonic “IMPLODeS + K” that I discussed in the article.)
One of the great things about ChessLecture is that it gives me a barometer to tell which topics might be popular as written articles. The “number of views” is a useful objective rating system. For some reason, “Eight-Dimensional Chess” absolutely exploded, with something like 600 views in the first three weeks and now over 800. It could end up as the highest-rated lecture posted in 2007, when all is said and done. On the other hand, my lecture on “Hikaru’s Long March,” even though I personally learned a lot from doing it, somehow left the audience deeply unimpressed. So I won’t be sending that to Chess Life any time soon, or ever.
There’s one thing I can’t figure out, though. How do listeners figure out which lectures they want to listen to? What made so many people want to listen to “Eight-Dimensional Chess,” but not “Hikaru’s Long March”? David Vigorito, one of the other ChessLecturers, thinks it’s all in the title. But if so, then “Eight-Dimensional Chess” was a pretty good title after all. (???)
By the way, I love David’s “Taking Out the Trash” series, which I think has the perfect title. (Even though I suspect that half of the openings I play would end up on his garbage dump.)
