In Erosion Control magazine, Mar/Apr 2009 issue: Synergy in Planting.

In the Missouri Chess Bulletin, Winter 2009 issue: Spotlight on Missouri Chess: Margaret Hua.

February Scholastic Chess column at ChessCafe.

Review of Let’s Play Chess at ChessCafe.

Would you pay $30 for a one-hour private lesson with a grandmaster? How about $30 for a couple dozen lessons with a GM? That’s what this book feels like. Lars Bo Hansen has a talent for really relating to the “average” club player.

As he describes his own chess development, “I had to learn a few lessons the hard way, as I never had a chess trainer (except for the first few years where I attended a school chess club every Friday), I had to do everything myself – choose my openings, analyse my own games and those of others, decide which books to study to improve, and so on. There was nothing extraordinary about this – that was (and still is) the basic condition for a young talent growing up in a small Western country like Denmark without much of a chess culture.”

Nothing extraordinary except that Hansen won multiple Danish scholastic/junior championships, made IM by age 19, and GM at age 22. This book is Hansen’s guide to self-training, particularly suited for players with little or no access to outside coaches.

You can read my full review of this outstanding book here.

In addition, another of my book reviews appeared:  606 Puzzles for Chess Nuts. This is a fun book ideal for a quick practice of chess tactics.

I was pleased to see that my Channel Protection Measures article was selected to be the feature article in the Jan/Feb 2009 issue of Erosion Control magazine.

I previously submitted an article for the Mar/Apr 2009 issue, and just sent in my article for the May 2009 edition. It is SO nice when these articles are done and turned in. They’re interesting to work on, but challenging in that it invariably takes multiple phone calls, e-mails and voice mails to just obtain contact information for interview subjects. Then these interview subjects typically are people who are very busy working “in the field” and so it takes another round of multiple phone calls, e-mails and voice mail messages to finally conduct the actual interview.

But when the piece is completed, it’s nice to just sit back and relax … for about five minutes, when it’s time to get back to work on the next pending project.

The key to this book, I believe, lies on a page most readers won’t even notice. It’s the copyright page at the beginning; near the bottom it lists three editorial consultants and a translator.

Perhaps when the author wrote the manuscript in his native language, all flowed well and errors were minimal. But somewhere between the original manuscript and the final edited version in print today, countless quirks appear.

The premise of the book is quite promising. Forty-seven players, ancient and modern, are examined with brief profiles, a picture and one or more games. Each profile is short, generally up to six pages in length. My personal chess library is full of books on openings, tactics, endgame strategy, puzzles and single-player biographies, but doesn’t contain a single volume profiling a multitude of players. Even Kasparov’s My Great Predecessors series required multiple volumes.

The full review may be found in the ChessCafe book review archives.

My November Scholastic Chess column, titled The Future of Scholastic Chess, Part Two, can be found here. We cover more responses to my questions from eighteen prominent players, coaches, administrators and parents. I conclude with a summary of the main issues raised, and add my own two cents.

Jacob Aagaard’s new book, Attacking Manual 1, is reviewed here. It’s full of typos and editing issues, but nevertheless it’s a definite winner – one that aspiring chess players should have on their shelves.

My third article for Erosion Control magazine appears in the Nov/Dec 2008 issue. It explores the landmark but controversial Rosgen stream classification system. What could be controversial about streams? Read all about it!