kosterix wrote:@Lyudmil, I understand your feelings, but many chess players have very bad personality traits. I don't know if there is any causality there.
What happened to you, happens also on other fronts, like on boardgamegeek, a site I frequent and often see 1-ratings without comments, or with comments stating something the reviewer did not like on political or other irrelevant aspect.
There is not much anyone can do about it, they are excesses and over time a more balanced view will take hold. Amazon does have buttons like helpful/not helpful/abuse, and viewers are not idiots. Have faith in regression to the mean, just ignore it and focus on the good things in life.
I regularly post reviews on amazon, simply to point out the goods and the bads and to note points that seller-reviewers fail to mention. In this respect I value social media highly, it's to inform. Based on actual experience and understanding of course.
Thanks for the work, by the way!
But the reviewer does have some points.
Say you play most evenings 2 times a game, that's about 400 games in a year (taking obligations elsewhere into account), to get to 50.000 would mean 125 years.
Also, I would write more from a reader's point of view, as in:
"If you like playing chess vs a computer, and are have problems currently beating komodo, look no further.
Based on x years of research and through method I have found a way for you to beat them."
Then put some statistics below that.
Follow by what the reader will get from reading the book.
Finally some points on how the reader will get most from this book, by virtue of its brilliant structure and so on.
I would also avoid offering a ebook version, ereaders are often very bad at showing diagrams and a study book requires flipping back and forth.
Selling unfortunately requires imagining a hesitant potential buyer...
Hi Kosterix, many thanks for your kind words!
I also hope justice will prevail in the end.
As pointed out, those are mostly short blitz games, almost never lasting more than 15 minutes total time, so you can play plenty of them, just crunch your numbers.
If both opponents have 5 minutes for the game, or I have 7 minutes and the engine 3, that makes 6 games per hour, 50 games in a 6-hour session.
If you are consistent, this will give you 15 000 games per year, so 50 000 games could be played in about 3 years or so.
Of course, you can not spend 6 hours daily, but I have been playing computer chess for the last 20 years..., so one hour daily would suffice.
To tell you the truth, I have analysed chess more than I have played games, especially during the last years.
Now, concerning the review, he posted 4! 1-star reviews for all my books in the matter of hours, without a verified purchase. Luckily, Amazon deleted his last review, I hope they will take other measures too.
No one gives such reviews for chess books on Amazon, maybe there are a couple or so, maybe even only 2. I mean reviews that are not based on fact.
All 1-star reviews I have seen have to deal with books that are completely unreadable on a kindle, wrong diagrams, wrong language symbols, Russian instead of English, fully blurred text, etc.
No one gives such reviews for the simple reason he hates the author, no one, this is maybe 1 in a million, what concerns chess books on Amazon.
He is talking of even spelling mistakes
everywhere, when the Amazon software showed there are no such. He is talking about illegal positions
everywhere, where there is not even a single one such...
I guess you see this is meant to destroy the book and its author...
You might be right about your other points, it is just that I am what I am, and I am doing what I can, though certainly there are lots of things to learn.
Thanks again for your feedback, I always appreciate sincere, non-biased opinions.