Chess Informant 113 Pdf Download
Tadic, Branko, and Josip Asik, eds. Chess Informant 125: Enigma Edition. Belgrade: Sahovski Informator, 2015. ISBN 9788672970791. PB 344p. List $39.99 (book), $29.99 (cd / download), $49.99 (book & cd).
Chess Informant 113 Pdf Download
If the Informant was the first paradigm shift in chess informatics, the arrival of the Internet, chess engines and databases effected the second. Few sectors of the chess world have been as disrupted dramatically by this shift as have periodicals.
The bulk of the book consists of English-language articles, and this is where the Informant brand makes its stand for relevancy. There are plenty of places to find raw game scores and even annotated games on the web, including The Week in Chess, chessbase.com, chess24.com, and uschess.org. An ambitious amateur, armed with an engine and a database, might even do a passable job in answering most of her own questions about specific moves.
Informant #125 goes some distance in proving that there is still room for periodicals in the Internet age. If they manage to bring more top annotators back into the fold, they may well reclaim their place as the preeminent series in the chess world.
MegaBase also comes with an update service, where weekly downloads of 5000 games are provided for a year. As a point of comparison, we are currently at update number 49 for MegaBase 2015, and 245713 games have been added to the database with all updates included.
Every issue of TWIC, from #1 (Sept 17, 1994) through the current day (#1094 at the time of writing), can be downloaded from The Week in Chess website. The databases from issue #920 (June 25, 2012) forward are also available. Combining those 175 files, a user could create a free database with 495,966 (482,290 after killing doubles) games to study. Among them we find 640 games played by Vachier-Lagrave (the most in the database), 516 by Nakamura, 507 by Svidler, and 7 miserable efforts by Hartmann.
This would be sufficient as a first step in chess research and database use, but Crowther also offers his readers the possibility of downloading a copy of his complete, private database for a donation of 30. The database contains every game ever published in TWIC, and as of the last version (#1-1093) it contained nearly 1.8 million games.
There is no substitute for having a large research database such as MegaBase or BigBase at your disposal for pre-game preparation, opening research and general chess study. Because MegaBase comes with annotated games, weekly updates and the PlayerBase, it is the premier database product on the market today. Serious opening analysts and correspondence players should absolutely consider supplementing BigBase or MegaBase with CorrBase.
The biggest names in chess, Garry Kasparov among others, used to say: " We are Children of the Informant." And new generations of world-class players are keeping that tradition alive today. We have been reaching out to the entire chess world for half a century.
It is no exaggeration to say that Chess Informant were pioneers in the development of modern chess publishing. We raised the standard of professionalism in both the speed and quality of our published analysis which led to other companies also smartening up their act.
Once in a while I should step back from individual books and CDsto take a look at the regular publications which form the practical core ofmost professional player's chess study. Outside of magazines and websites(about which more later), the first which naturally come to mind are the 'BigThree', i.e., Chess Informant, New in Chess Yearbook, andChessBase Magazine. All three have been around for a long time and showno sign of losing momentum. I would say that most masters and those at a higherlevel use at least one of these, although it should be kept in mind that thereare up-to-date games and annotations on pay services, two of which I reviewbelow.
Chess Informant is a good place to start, not only becauseit is the granddaddy of the theoretical revolution in chess, but because it isjust publishing its 100th issue. To show you what that means, and gain someperspective on how consistent this publication has been, consider that thefirst Informant appeared in January 1966, and it has come out withoutreal interruption ever since (political crises and economic problemsnotwithstanding). In fact, there is now available a disc of '100,093 fullyannotated games' that appeared in the time between these first 99 issues. I'mnot sure how this count is arrived at, but 'annotated' is the key word:previous to this, annotated games had been printed in various magazines andtournament books, but side-by-side with many others that were unannotated(perhaps a selection of games from a tournament). The Informant blewaway all other publications by printing hundreds of annotated games, a highpercentage of them theoretically important, in each issue.
Returning to earth, Chess Informant 99 has 413 main games(some fragments), most of them incredibly densely annotated. Imbedded in themare recent important games relating to the opening, given as fragments or evencomplete games (there are 500 such in this issue; hence the number of 'games'is in a sense considerably higher than nominally listed). The Informantalso comes in CD form, with the contents readable by a unique Chess Readerdeveloped the company. I'll ignore the features that accompany this product forlack of space, but you can download it from their website. After considerabledelay, Sahovsky Informator also releases PGN versions of the games. This is oneof the drawbacks of the Informant compared to ChessBase Magazine.Data in PGN format is usable by almost all database programs. In particular,ChessBase converts PGN files into its own compatible databases, and its theindustry standard.
I've gone on at great length about ChessBase Magazinebefore, especially in Column #73, so I'll mostly list features of this DVDrather than discuss them at length (all of the games, multimedia, etc., aredownloadable onto your computer as ChessBase files) . I should begin by saying,however, that there are supplemental discs to each issue called 'Extra',which come with a subscription. They add a new batch of games to the database,most of which are probably available on TWIC, but also include features such asmultimedia tournament reports and interviews. Sometimes the interviews arefairly perfunctory (Fabiano Caruano in CBM Extra #119), other timesalmost an hour long and fascinating. For example, I loved the video interviewwith Florencio Campomanes in ChessBase Magazine Extra #113, which wasfull of all kinds of historically-significant personal accounts. Otherinterviews of relatively recent vintage have been Elizbar Ubilava (Anand'scohort and trainer for many years) and journalist/writer Alexander Roshal. Ofcourse the World Champions and contenders are regularly interviewed in theMagazine itself, often including one very lengthy multimedia interviewof a famous player.
The issue has the usual columns/databases: endgames (KarstenMüller), tactics (Oliver Reeh), opening traps (Rainer Knaak), and DanielKing's Move by Move (the middlegame column, normally by Peter Wells is missing,but is a regular feature). One of the most important sections is the'Telechess' database, in which we find a large database of roughly 2500correspondence chess games, some annotated, and equally importantly,correspondence tournament reports, ratings, etc.
You also get 12 opening surveys from grandmasters (downloadablewith a database) on a wide range of opening variations, for example, lines inthe Sicilian Four Knights Defence, the English Defence, Najdorf Sicilian, BenkoGambit, Ruy Lopez, Dutch Defence, and so forth.
ChessBase Magazine is a fantastic publication and, I admit, theone of these three that I spend the most time with. It shows how chess can bepresented in an especially appealing way if the creators of a DVD exploit theirmedium to the fullest.
Which if any of these Big Three publications is right for you? Ofcourse, it may be that you're more interested in reading games collections,books about historical chess figures, the endgame, or the latest opening.That's fine; when I'm not reading books for review, I'm often inclined to stickwith lighter material. But assuming that you're an active tournament player whohas to face reasonably good opposition, you should try to make room in yourbudget for at least one of these more sophisticated products. I don't thinkthat I can call one or the other objectively 'best', because they are verydifferent, and a choice comes down to individual preferences.
Finally, if you're interested in the broadest range ofchess news, multimedia, and categories/types of information (annotated games,theory, etc.), you may want to get ChessBase Magazine. It has extremelylengthy multimedia interviews of famous players (usually 1 per issue), completefirst-rate tournament reports with top-level annotations, and many shorterinterviews with well-known players and/or press conferences with them.Additional multimedia features are tournament reports and gameanalysis/presentation by players. Personally I like these multimediapresentations very much because of their personal nature as well as theircontent. Beyond that, Chess Base Magazine comes with database games,training, endgames, correspondence chess, etc. Although CBM hasexcellent opening surveys, the opening theory hound will likely get morecontent out of the other two paper publications. Then, too, theirs are notdownloadable, at least in the most popular and usable format, whereas ChessBasematerial can be searched and manipulated, and you do get a database of recentgames.
However, you have to seriously consider whether you want to use acomputer disk or prefer a book. CBM's electronic format requires you tostare at a screen; the rewards are that you get far more total information, anddownloadable databases for all the columns. The negative is that many peopleare in front of a screen all day in their work, and may prefer a book.