American Chess Magazine, Issue #4

The latest issue of the United States' best chess publication, the American Chess Magazine, is available. While it was the best American chess magazine, now it's the best American chess magazine. Before it was somewhat like New in Chess Magazine with a U.S. flavor, but now it really and clearly is a periodical dedicated to chess in the United States.

This issue covers the goings-on in St. Louis, of course (with Shakhriyar Mamedyarov covering the Sinquefield Cup and Ivan Sokolov writing about the Rapid & Blitz), but that's about it for international events. Other major events, including Norway Chess in Stavanger and the Grand Chess Tour events in Paris and Leuven, are mentioned only en passant without any narrative near the end of the issue, with only results and the occasional lightly annotated game. (But none from those super-tournaments.)

Two other major events are covered again - both from 2016: the Baku Olympiad and the Carlsen-Karjakin match. Both events had so much material they've been revisited in multiple issues - I think this is the third time the world championship has been covered. (At least it is being covered deeply, by the usually 2700+ GM Ernesto Inarkiev, currently rated 2693.)

On to the new. A number of U.S. players are profiled, most especially Awonder Liang, currently the world's youngest GM. He is interviewed, and some of his best games from this year are presented. Other profilees are GM Sam Sevian, Maggie Feng, and new IM Bryce Tiglon. More broadly, the issue also takes a look at the very successful chess program at Webster University in St. Louis.

There are columns by chess legend Vassily Ivanchuk and endgame specialist Karsten Mueller, and there's an interesting column with Jacob Aagaard (who for no obvious reason - to scare small children and animals? - is posed like the "Breaking Bad" guy) on decision-making in chess. There are also columns by American GMs, including the experienced quartet of John Fedorowicz, Joel Benjamin, Alex Fishbein, and Michael Rohde.

Carsten Hansen presents short reviews of 10 new books, Jon Edwards offers a brief discussion of endgame tablebases, and there is more besides, including an eight-and-a-half page summary of events in the U.S. taking place in the U.S. from this past June-September.

There are a few other columns as well, but this survey of the highlights should be enough to help the reader decide whether or not to buy the magazine. It seems to me that the publisher has a challenge here, to make the ACM attractive to U.S. audiences while not making it so parochial that international readers find it uninteresting. My suspicion is that it might be leaning a bit further to the parochial side, but I'm sure the publishers know better than I do - they can look at the receipts and feedback. My suggestion would be an explicit column on the openings, and less time spent looking back at older events (i.e. no more Baku or Carlsen-Karjakin). But I'm just one voice, and of course they should listen and try to accommodate as many opinions as they reasonably can.

Full - and amusing - disclosure: I may end up writing an openings column for ACM.

American Chess Magazine, Issue 3

The United States of America imports most of its grandmasters from around the world (or at least it seems to) and many of its products from Asia (cars, electronics, toys, etc.), so it's only fitting that its best magazine would be produced by the good folks from Serbia. The third issue of the American Chess Magazine has hit the metaphorical stands, and like its predecessors it's a good one, worthy of your money even if you're not from the U.S.A.

That said, the magazine, or at least this issue, is more U.S.-centric than the first two. The ACM is a young periodical finding its way in the world, and besides that it's natural that it would have a heavier weighting on American chess given that its centerpiece is the U.S. Championship. Make that Championships, plural: it is new U.S. Women's Champ Sabina Foisor who "wins" the cover; overall champion Wesley So has a much smaller, inset picture, probably because he was featured on the cover of the previous issue. Of the issue's 152 pages, 43 are dedicated to the Championships: 26 to the "men's" (Open) event, 17 to the women's. So deeply annotates one of his wins from the tournament, Ivan Sokolov deeply annotates three games from the tournament (including two of So's), Varuzhan Akobian (who was in contention for first up until the end) annotated two more, and then Jaan Ehlvest adds a report on some of the openings highlights from the tournament. As for the women's coverage, it focuses heavily, but not exclusively, on Foisor's result and games.

After that comes a series of a la carte articles which, with one exception, have no intrinsic connection to U.S. chess:

1. Vassily Ivanchuk takes a very close look at one of his games from the Gibraltar tournament this past January.

2. John Fedorowicz starts a new column, inspired by Samuel Reshevsky's old Chess Life and Review column "The Art of Positional Play", entitled "The New Art of Positional Play". The first topic is "The Benoni Knight". Which knight is this, you ask? That's an excellent question. There's a picture at the start of the article with Black's pieces all in their starting positions and a White knight on b5, so you might think that it's White's queen's knight. Oddly, he never explicitly identifies the Benoni Knight, but on the third of the article's four pages the cat comes out of the bag. When White plays 15.Nc4-e3, "Fed" comments, "The second important knight move. White refuses to trade the "Benoni knight" and is able to use it on the kingside." At last! The knight was traded off a little later and without annotational fanfare, so I'm a bit confused about the title. But leaving that aside, it was an instructive game with notes that will be helpful to readers of vastly different ratings.

3. Karsten Mueller offers a tribute to the late great trainer (and in the days of his playing career, strong practical player) Mark Dvoretsky. Dvoretsky was a big fan of the endgame, and Mueller shows a number of his achievements in that phase of the game, with a short supplement summarizing some of Dvoretsky's finds in the famous Karpov-Kasparov knight vs. bishop ending from their first, unfinished match.

4. Alex Fishbein also writes an endgame column, "Mind Tricks in the Endgame". I won't offer spoilers here, but it's noteworthy that all but one of his examples are all taken from Candidates and World Championship events. Even the world's best are susceptible to psychological pitfalls!

5. Now for something U.S.-centric, and semi-self-referential. The American Chess Magazine may be the latest American chess magazine, but what was the first? Chess historian John S. Hilbert takes a careful look at a priority dispute between two contenders, both of which started late in the year 1846: The Chess Palladium and Mathematical Sphinx and Charles H. Stanley's magazine, whose proper title is unclear. Hilbert's article is very entertaining and touches on much more than the issue of priority, but he does answer the question in the end. And the winner is...sorry, get the magazine.

6. A carry-over from the previous issue: part two of Ernesto Inarkiev's look at the best games from the Carlsen-Karjakin match. (Spoiler alert: Carlsen won.) He takes a close look at two games that "got away": game 3, which Carlsen should have won, and game 9, which Karjakin should have won.

7. FM Carsten Hansen has a column briefly discussing each of 10 noteworthy "books" - though this includes a two-DVD set, while at least one of the books doesn't seem particularly noteworthy based on his comments. But YMMV. I also note, with some amusement, that he praised a book that I also deemed worthy for general audiences, to the consternation of several critics. Watch out, Carsten!

After this come a pair of advertisements dressed up to look like articles. Jon Edwards gives the reader a four-page tour of the goodies on Chess24, and Danny Rensch offers some reflections on the benefits of chess on the internet while smuggling in lots of implicit plugs for Chess.com. To be sure, both Chess24 and Chess.com are fine sites and very much worth considering - I have no problem with either of them, and have regularly mentioned events and articles from both. But are these really articles, or a new sort of advertising? I'd like to hear what other readers think about this.

After the foregoing, the focus returns to the U.S.A. Joel Benjamin offers his opinionated musings, in this issue writing about "Things I Like, and Things I Don't Like", and much of his article addresses the youth movement in U.S. chess. Michael Rohde looks at a great win by Ray Robson over Alexander Shabalov from the U.S. Championship. Alex Fishbein reports on the Charlotte (North Carolina) GM/IM Invitational. Mackenzie Molner looks at the Philly Open, Daniel Parmet recaps the Clark Street Capital Invitational in Chicago (with annotations by three GMs and an up-and-coming FM)...and on it goes for another 25 pages. Finally, a five questions interview with GM and FIDE Senior Trainer Adrian Mikhalchishin rounds out the magazine.

There's plenty of prose to go along with the all high-level games and annotations, lots of glossy pictures, reader comments, a tactics page and more besides. For any U.S. players who are even semi-serious about the game and have any curiosity about what's happening in U.S. chess, please subscribe! The periodical should be of interest outside the U.S. as well, but it would be a pity for those of us in the U.S. if the ACM were to go the way of the Sphinx or Stanley's chess magazine.

Ordering info here.

The American Chess Magazine, Issue 2

The second issue of the best chess magazine in the United States, and probably one of the best chess magazines in the world, is in print. Weighing in at 152 large pages on glossy paper, with full color photographs, the publication is a physical pleasure for those of us who still appreciate non-pixilated productions. But content is king; how does the American Chess Magazine (ACM) fare?

Very well. First of all, there's plenty of chess material: 153 games and game fragments, and the vast majority are complete games. Most of the chess material is well-annotated, and generally by GMs. Vassily Ivanchuk annotates one game, but other very strong GMs contribute more: Leinier Dominguez (3 games), Ernesto Inarkiev (6), Baadur Jobava (2), Hou Yifan (1), Ivan Sokolov (7), Jeffery Xiong (3), Alex Lenderman (2); and there are plenty of other GM contributions as well.

There's a fair amount of "talk" in the issue: it's not all games and variations. The analyses are a mix of words and moves, and there's plenty of material apart from the games. For instance, there is a short interview with Wesley So, and three GMs offer their thoughts on his rise. There are several pages of sidebars in which chess fans offer their thoughts on So's rise as well, which is an interesting and unusual feature. Mihail Marin offers "An Anecdotal Review of the World Title Matches", which includes eight pages of reflections and almost no actual chess whatsoever. Joel Benjamin offers his musings on rapid play in the context of the PRO Chess League, and there's much more besides. I'll note that there are three columns that are advice-based: Swedish GM Pontus Carlsson and American GM Yasser Seirawan both offer some tips for improving one's chess, while GM Nikola Mitkov offers "Five Key Elements of Norm-Hunting".

Most of the talk is in the context of reviewing events, and the centerpiece of this issue is the world championship match between Magnus Carlsen and Sergey Karjakin. (Spoiler alert: Carlsen won in a rapid tiebreak.) This rightly receives a nice chunk of the magazine: 16 pages, with the key games annotated by the 2700+ rated Inarkiev. Wijk aan Zee gets even more attention, and Gibraltar enjoys some coverage as well.

There are tactical puzzles, and endgame column (GM Alex Fishbein has a nice piece called "Queen Endings Demystified"), book reviews, and one last feature that I appreciate is a section near the end offering a brief digest of U.S. events. There are about 13 pages summarizing the tournament results and including interesting games.

This is not a complete list of what's in the magazine, but it's enough to give a taste of what's there. For more on the publication, have a look here.

Recommended? Yes - for strong club players (at least 1800, or those rapidly heading there) and up, and/or for those interested in U.S. chess and U.S. chess players.

American Chess Magazine: Issue 1

Chess in the United States is going swimmingly, with three players in the top eight in the world, the Olympic title, a host of talented juniors, two big chess hubs (New York City and St. Louis), universities that import GMs by the barrel-full, and super-sponsor Rex Sinquefield, for starters. Russia still has an overall edge based on their longer history and deeper infrastructure, while China and India will be hard to keep up with due to their population advantages, but the U.S. is clearly one of the world's chess super-powers and should remain there for the foreseeable future.

One area of chess where it is most decidedly not a super-power, however, is in the realm of chess publishing. The best chess book publishers are in Europe, while the United States Chess Federation's magazine, Chess Life, is not up to the standard of a publication like New in Chess.

This may be changing, however - thanks, ironically, to the Serbian juggernaut that is Chess Informant. They (particularly Josip Asik) are the publishers of a new and very impressive periodical called American Chess Magazine (henceforth ACM). This, like the Informant itself, is intended to be a quarterly, and the first issue, for fall-winter 2016/2017, is now in print.

The issue is a monster. The pages are just short of A4 size - 8.3" x 11", the same as contemporary issues of New in Chess Magazine (NICM). Like NICM it is a full-color magazine, but where NICM has "only" 106 pages per issue, ACM weighs in at a hefty 152 pages. (To be fair, NICM comes out 8x/year, twice as often as ACM is going to - at least at this point.) The magazine looks nice, and more importantly, is packed with content; there is very little filler, nor are the pages littered with ads.

You can find much more about the issue here, including a full table of contents and a short video preview that will offer a great overview of what you can expect from the magazine. The price is a bit high as magazines go - $29.95 for the first issue - but I would expect that price to go down somewhat as subscribers, and subsequently the number of advertisers and the amount they'll need to pay for ad space, both increase. The publication deserves a worldwide audience, as the overwhelming majority of the content is of general interest and not centered on the distinctively American chess scene.

One more comparison with NICM, which has a cover price of $12.99 per issue. I counted up the number of games, game fragments, and other chess content in both magazines, and here are the results:

NICM 2016, issue 7: 17 annotated games, three unannotated games, 14 annotated game fragments, three unannotated game fragments, one opening article, and nine tactics puzzles.

ACM: Fall-Winter 2016/7: 26 annotated games (some very deeply), one unannotated game, 26 very lightly annotated games (near the end of the magazine, showing some highlights from relatively minor U.S. events), 25 annotated game fragments, an openings article by Baadur Jobava in which he looks at four different opening lines, an endgame column by Jonathan Speelman, 14 tactical puzzles and two compositions.

Lest you think that ACM neglects NICM's strengths, like interviews, profiles, and recaps, it isn't so: ACM has done a fine job there, too. So I'd recommend giving ACM a try, at least if you're a fairly strong player - at least 1800 or so, or rapidly heading for that figure. (At least if you're buying it almost entirely for the high-level chess content. As with NICM, there is plenty of prose, too, so readers who want to enjoy it as a magazine and are content to browse the games primarily for pleasure should ignore the rating caveat offered two sentences ago.)

Full disclosure: I was asked to join the editorial staff, and while I wasn't involved in any way with the first issue, it is quite possible that I will be involved in the near future. I think the review was objective and my enthusiasm is genuine and merited, but I'm not neutral here: I want the publication to succeed (provided that they continue to put out a good product).