Web Watch

16 May 2003

Composition Tourney. There are many ways to celebrate your birthday, but certainly one of the most exotic is to stage a chess composition tournament and be its judge - a luxury not available to most people! Well, IM Yochanan Afek, who is also a renowned chess composer, enjoys such a privilege and he organised a tournament to mark his 50th jubilee. You can see a report on its results, published by Attila Schneider.

New Chess Newsletter. There are many chess newsletters around and while one might look at them as our ultimate competitors, we at Chess Today view them as colleagues who also devote time energy to the benefit of our favourite game. And the their existence will help to make sure that Chess Today maintains its high standards! So, we happy to announce that recently Chess Weekly, a Russian weekly chess paper, and Convekta Ltd. (Chess Assistant Software maker) started a new weekly project - An Internet Chess Newspaper in English named CHESS WEEKLY. Every Thursday you will find news on the following items at http://weekly.convekta.com

Book reviews. Site featuring chess book reviews are plentiful on the Web and here I would like to mention one of them: Seagaard Chess Reviews, which makes independent book reviews. Another site to keep an eye on is GM Square, where quite a number of book reviews has been published - more is to come!

Chess Web sites. Those who speak Russian would find a lot of information at the site managed by Evgeny Atarov. Another Moscow-based site is WorldChessRating, but the site is actually in English. It was backed by Gary Kasparov, but halfway through the Linares tournament the site seized operating - allegedly due to financial problems. Apparently, those difficulties have been resolved (at least, for now!) and site is going to get back to business from May 19.

One of my favourite chess site is ChessBase.com, which usually has pretty good stories. If you go there soon enough, you should see links to news about boxer Lennox Lewis and chess and a biography of IM Milan Vukcevich (1937 - 2003), who was also Grandmaster in chess composition.