Coming Soon – Woodpecker 2!

Greetings readers! I know you will be excited about this one. The front cover alone is a thing of beauty, wouldn’t you agree?

Like Tiger’s Chaos Theory, this title will be available on Wednesday 21 August. The Woodpecker Method is one of the most popular titles in our history, so I’m sure you know the general concept. Whereas the original Woodpecker is a tactical training manual, this one contains 1000 positional exercises. Read the excerpt here.

I am proud to say that this book has undergone the most rigorous quality checking ever performed at this company. Every exercise has been scrutinized and critiqued by test solvers, leading Axel to replace many exercises (with the replacements being subjected to the same quality checks) and refine the solutions to others. Then the material was subjected to additional engine checks, combined with human judgements. See pages 11-12, available in the excerpt, where Axel explains the process in more detail. We also invested resources into double-proofreading the work: first making corrections in the original ChessBase files, followed by a second proofread after typesetting. We checked, rechecked and rechecked again that all exercises and solutions match up, and that all exercises show the correct side to move. It’s inevitable that there will be mistakes somewhere, but we did everything in our power to give our readers the best experience possible.

This book will also set a Quality Chess record for the title appearing on the greatest variety of digital platforms. It will go to Forward Chess and Chess Tempo, as you would expect. Chessable will also have it. And thanks to the recent merger, New in Chess will start publishing Quality Chess titles on their app, with this being the first.

Finally, in a particularly exciting development, we hope to start publishing on Kindle in the near future! Without going into details, we looked into this in the past but ran into a specific problem. New in Chess told us they have a solution to it, and we are working with them to make Woodpecker 2 our first Kindle title. This is unknown territory so I can’t guarantee the timescale for that – but we are working to make it happen. The Kindle situation is a great example of the knowledge-sharing benefits of the recent merger.

8 thoughts on “Coming Soon – Woodpecker 2!”

  1. Hi Julien. Yes, the physical book, Forward Chess, Chess Tempo and Chessable will all have the same publication date. New in Chess app and Kindle are the only ones I can’t be certain of, simply because they are new platforms for us with a new conversion process. Hopefully they’ll be ready for the same date though.

    Edit (2 August 2024): I’ve just found out that Chessable will actually have a later publication date, as they need some additional time for the video production process. I’m told they will release the course in two parts, the first being due in September and the second in November or December 2024.

  2. Will the book be released as paperback version ? If yes, when ? Right now i can see only hardcover for 24 august on website.
    Thanks for your feedback,

  3. Hi Olivier, initially Woodpecker 2 will be hardcover only, and the paperback version will be announced in due course. Something like a six-month delay would be typical, but that’s just a guideline and the actual date may differ.
    By the way, this part of our process is likely to change in 2025 and beyond, and we’ll give more details about that at a later date.

  4. Hi I’m super happy to hear this book will be available on Chesstempo this Wednesday because I’m going to have a hard time getting in Australia otherwise! Do you know what the price will be? I’ve never got a book on chesstempo before, will it just appear in the catalogue some time on that day?

  5. Hi Aden, I guess it will just appear in the CT catalogue on publication day. I don’t know what the CT price will be. If you look at their other prices for QC products and compare to our print editions, it will give a clue. You can always contact Chess Tempo directly for more accurate information about such things.

  6. Hi Ian, we’ve only just released Woodpecker 2 so it’s a bit early to be talking about dates for the next volume. We’ll see how things go and announce a date when the time comes.

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