More Shopping

Spent some of this morning looking for chess related bargains in the various bookshops, computer shops and games shops in Canberra City. Bargains were fairly hard to come by, although there are plenty of chess books on the shelves in a couple of bookshops.
Apart from Academic Remainders (which I referred to in a previous post), the new Borders bookshop in the Canberra Centre has a wide variety of titles. The only drawback is that would regard them as slightly pricey (although to me anything over $20 is pricey). I did get The Reassess Your Chess Workbook by IM Jermey Silman for $44 a couple of weeks back, and they still have copies in stock. I am also tempted by Secrets of Russian Chess Volumes 1&2 by Parr and Alburt but have so far been able to resist the urge to buy. There are plenty of other chess books there if you are interested.
A couple of people have asked me where the best place to get a chess set is. If you want a cheap and cheerful set where you can't tell the difference between the King and the Queen, and the pawns are in danger of being carried off by large ants, then I guess you can try the toy section in any department store. If instead you want a proper tournament set, then your options are somewhat limited. The Mind Games store in the City are selling proper sets for $20 (and slightly improper ones for $15), but I wasn't able to find a price for boards. They also sell chess clocks if you are interested, but you would be better off getting those from Australian Chess Enterprises in Sydney.
In the end the only bargain I did find was in the area of software. ChessMaster 10th Edition has now been released by Ubisoft under its "That's Hot!" range. This means it is retailing at $19.95, and is probably available in most computer games shops. Having installed and given it a preliminary run through, it looks pretty good. A full review will follow at some stage.

Usual disclaimer: I have no financial relationship with any of the retailers listed, with the exception of Australian Chess Enterprises, who pay me for articles I write for their magazine Australian Chess.