Your opponent must have fallen off his chair when he played 29. h4 to "protect" his knight, but you captured it anyway.>

I'm making my first book "Love, Death and Tea" free on Kindle for the next five days - 17 September to 21 September 2014.

There is no chess in it - sorry! - but a lot of my trademark off the wall humour.

And it's free. Did I mention that?

UK:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Love-Death-...

It was available for free all round the world - but Amazon have this funny thing about only letting you buy it from your own regional version of their website. So people in the States have to use Amazon.com, the UK has to use Amazon.co.uk and so on.

If you had clicked on the second of the links it should have taken you to the .com website where it was free. I had more than 100 downloads from the former colonies, so it should have worked.

But the link I gave in my profile was for amazon.co.uk only. So, my bad. I'll change the link.

You can buy it from Amazon.com, but I'm afraid the free promotion period is over. You're only allowed one five day free period in every three months.

I've recently (5 days ago) had a little girl (my first child!) and I hope I will one day impart my love of the game to her. I will most probably use your book at some point to see if I can stoke the fire in her!

Happy Christmas.

Congratulations on your new arrival! It's a wonderful experience to watch them grow. My boy is now 14 - leaving childhood behind and becoming a man. Those have been 14 magical years. I would not have swapped them for the world.

One thing I have found is that it is very hard to predict how they will develop. My boy knows how to play chess but he has no interest in the game. I tried a few times to interest him but it didn't stick. Science and computers are his thing.

I'm about to start a second chess book which might be more relevant for your girl. I'm aiming it at new players who know the moves but want to win more often. It will also have stories and jokes - a mixture of my serious posts (with diagrams) and my digressions.

A little disappointed to be second to say this, but I've been a fan for a while now, and would love to help out if I can.

My chess level is something around Fridayish. Sometimes I get both patient and lucky during the week-ends, but can't give myself much credit for those unexpected sparks of lucidity.

Using the same idea than the previous post, please drop me a mail at muztang 86 at gmail dot com if I can be one of your beta readers.

I'm a couple of days away from finishing the books. I'll email to you them later this week.

The accent tends to vary according to education and class. The tough sons of miners tended to speak closer to the Yorkshire dialect, but the sons of bank managers generally wanted to head south and speak like Londoners.

All is well here. How about you?

I tried to learn the QGD as black some years ago and couldn't get on with it. White seemed to have all the fun, and in club chess you could well find yourself facing someone who would bash out the colle or London or somesuch.

Those aren't great openings at GM level, but the old timers at the chess club have been playing them for decades. They're easy to play and not all that easy for black to get an advantage.

So I ended up with my black defence to everything except 1. e4 being the Dutch defence. More specifically, I play the classical Dutch where Black plays f5, Nf6, e6, d6, 0-0.

My e4 black opening is the French, so I get into the Dutch with 1. d4 e6 to cut out some of the anti-Dutch lines.

The best book on the classical dutch that I have found is by Simon Williams. I don't have a QGD book to recommend, I'm afraid. I'd probably start with Capa's games as black. He seemed to go through a phase of endless QGDs.