Chess Informant 125 Pdf 18
Sherlyn Rakestrow
Chess Informant (Serbian: Šahovski Informator) is a publishing company from Belgrade, Serbia that periodically (since 2012, four volumes per year) produces volumes of a book entitled Chess Informant, as well as the Encyclopaedia of Chess Openings, Encyclopaedia of Chess Endings, Opening Monographs, other print publications, and software (including electronic editions of most print publications). Aleksandar Matanović and Milivoje Molerović founded the company in 1966 for the purpose of offering the rest of the world the sort of access to chess information enjoyed by Soviet players. The company has sold three million books in 150 countries, according to its website.[1]
The Chess Informant system of codes for the classification of chess openings, and its system of symbols have set the international standard[6] for organizing chess information and communicating this information across language barriers. The system of codes is explained in ten languages on the front of each issue of Informant, the Encyclopaedia of Chess Openings, and other publications.
Starting from Volume 113 (2012), Chess Informant has introduced major changes in its structure, including several authors' columns written in English, e.g. "Garry's choice" by Garry Kasparov, "Top Five" by selected top grandmasters, "Labs- theoretical surveys" by ten selected grandmasters, etc.[8]
For it was in this year that the Yugoslav GM Aleksandar Matanović (with Milivoje Molerović) published the first issue of Chess Informant. An image of the first Chess Informant was nearly as elusive as the book itself (which recently sold out in a rollback special by the Chess Informant team - of which I bought Informants 2 and 4-8 to donate at a suitable time). After much scouring I found a pile with the first CI's front cover visible:
Having recently written my first book, I have a good idea how hard it is to enter these uncharted waters! For those of you unfamiliar with Chess Informant, it started out as a collection of high-level games, lightly annotated over a six-month period. That may seem like nothing nowadays with databases, but at the time this was the main resource of every professional player. Indeed, when travelling to tournaments, many professionals would carry more Informants than clothes in their luggage!
One only needs to remember Kasparov's quote 'We are children of the Informant" to appreciate the influence these books had (and continue to have!) on generations of players. In my case, I was introduced to the Informants in 2004. My coach at the time, FM Brett Tindall (who still runs a very successful chess coaching business in Sydney), had a friend who had stopped playing chess recently and wanted to sell his semi-recent Chess Informants at a bulk discount. I would read through the Informants in my head over breakfast, trying to follow the games in my head as far as I could! The game that probably made the biggest impression on me was a striking Kalashnikov win by Nataf against John Nunn (before he started winning World Chess Solving Championships):
I'm not the only Australian to be influenced by CI either - when IM Gary Lane tried to use this idea as Black against Zong-Yuan Zhao, the youngest Australian to become a Grandmaster (until IM Anton Smirnov achieves his final norm ), came armed with an improvement!
Incidentally, this game was also analysed in Chess Informant 90, by GM Ian Rogers. That may well have been a reply to Lane's article on his 2004 Australian Championship title, where he annotated the following key game:
So we started with the Informant, and ended with the Kalashnikov. I would advise not to fire away your engines, or you may be dishearted, but those with aggressive intent against the Open Sicilian might entertain 'The Killer Sicilian' by Tony Rotella, as reviewed by IM John Bartholomew here:
To discover more about how I can help you improve your play and subsequently, raise your chess ratings quickly, send me an email at illingwo...@gmail.com, or direct message me on Facebook: m.me/max.illingworth.16
All the entertainment and fun a true chess fan could want is inside: topical games and tournament reports, fashionable openings and instructive commentary, photos and profiles of leading players, creative insights and personal perspectives of our grandmaster contributors, sparkling combinations, and mind-blowing studies.
Chess Informant was considered the chess bible by none other than Bobby Fischer who pored over each issue carefully studying all the games - as shown on the famous "Bobby The Champ" photograph, taken in Reykjavik 1972.
However, games were available, albeit not in a number of millions; but the most current ones, the most important and the most beautiful ones were made available to look and delight at. Not at a touch of a button, but by patiently turning page by page of a printed book of usually not less than 300 pages, containing not less than 200 games. The pleasure had to be eagerly awaited for a couple of months at a time.
That is over a half a century ago! Young generations, spoilt with choice by the powerful ChessBase Mega Database, might not have even heard of the existence of the Informator (the original name in Serbian is "Informator" = Informant), but the Chess Informant has contributed significantly to the development of chess and chess theory.
In the mid 60s, when the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) was a strong country where chess was respected and thriving, five chess enthusiasts, from various calls of life, but all ardent chess players, international masters and grandmasters, got the ingenious idea of providing the chess community with collections of annotated games that would be preserved for posterity.
They were unhappy that beautiful, significant games and novelties were lost in oblivion as the only record of them were fragile score sheets. Resolved to fill in this gap, they embarked on an ambitious adventure: they would create a chess publication with the aim of bringing to light the best, most interesting games that would be annotated, most often, by the players themselves. The publication would follow three main principles:
It started with two issues per year until the 50th volume, in 1990. Then it increased to three issues per year, until 2011. Since 2012, it is published four times per year, in March, June, September and December.
Until the appearance of the Chess Informant, players could only rely on some annotated games found in the Russian press. The Russian school was reigning supreme and the Russian publications were the main source of information on tournaments and games. But in general games were only sporadically published in chess columns, in broadsheets, or in thin specialized chess magazines. Many players and trainers made their own game collections by cutting out selected games from magazines or other sources or by copying them by hand.
The Chess Informant, although vaguely following the Russian model, would go further by presenting several hundreds of games, carefully chosen from the most significant chess events and collected in a long lasting copy of a book. The Chess Informant immediately enchanted all players that would embrace it as their unavoidable tool for their studies and preparation. The greatest names in chess were ready to annotate games or to send in their own games for publication.
Over the years, all World Champions who came after Alexander Alekhine have annotated games for the Informant, starting from Euwe, who at the time was 65 years old and well out of competitive chess. He annotated only one game for the Informant but contributed to the Encyclopedia of Chess Openings, a side product of the Informant. And Euwe's book From Steinitz to Fischer was published by Chess Informant in 1976.
Mikhail Botvinnik was also approaching the end of his playing career and he annotated only few of his own games for the Informant. But he annotated 29 games by his students, the future world champions, Karpov and Kasparov. Vasily Smyslov annotated 128, Mikhail Tal 367, Tigran Petrosian 509 and Boris Spassky 17 of their own games.
Fischer is known to have been scourging the Russian periodicals to keep up with whatever games and potential novelties he could put his hands on. When the Informant appeared he would not only avidly study games from its pages, but also succumbed to its charms and annotated 10 of his own games for the Informant!
He is seen on a photo consulting the Informant on the day he was crowned World Champion. The photo was taken by the famous photographer Harry Benson, who for a certain time was appointed as Fischer's official photographer.
It is well known which game Fischer was analyzing: Florin Gheorghiu vs Ulf Andersson, Las Palmas (1972), game 705 from the 13th edition of the Informant. The game was played in the fourth round of the 1. International Chess Tournament "Ciudad Las Palmas de Gran Canaria" (The City Las Palmas of the Canary Islands) in Spain, and it was awarded the "best game prize".
Perhaps was Fischer attracted to this game because the Romanian player, Florin Gheorghiu (b.1944), was his unsung nemesis as their score was equal and Gheorghiu had even won a well publicized game against Fischer.
Kasparov, Karpov, Kramnik and Anand have also been faithful supporters of the Informant. They analysed several hundreds of their games, in books or on CDs, e.g. in the CD series "Play like Champions", for which Kramnik and Anand have also written a foreword.
Kasparov has co-operated with the Informant in one way or other since its very beginning, but from the 113th issue onwards, he has graced its pages with a personal column, "Garry's Choice". As the title suggests, Garry picked topical games that he analyzed and mused over in his inimitable style.
New generations of world-class players are not less appreciative; along with the rich computerized collections of analyzed chess games, many of today's elite players recognize the usefulness of the Informant.
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