| Online Resources for Chess News | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Specialized resources offer chess news that the mainstream press doesn't deliver. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
(July 2004)
Q: What's new?
A: If you mean chess, you're not likely to find the answer to this common question in any mainstream news sources.
Chess news is dispersed mainly via chess-specific resources.
Continuing the About Chess top-level review of Chess Categories (see Articles & Resources to the left), let's look at our News category.
Many chess sites, including About Chess, publish regular news reports.
Our News category links only to sites whose purpose is to provide chess news.
These sites come and go infrequently, so we had little to change when we checked possible links.
We deleted one link (Kasparov's WorldChessRating.com) which had disappeared at some time in the last few months.
We also made a note to watch another link (Chess.fm) which has changed course recently and is perhaps no longer a true news site.
We also reworked our list of chess calendars into a new Calendars category.
Calendar pages cover an important service which has evolved considerably since we last looked.
The major chess news sites are The Week in Chess (TWIC) and ChessBase News.
Both are among the best chess sites on the Web and are worth at least a regular weekly visit.
TWIC is a straight news site offering full crosstables, brief commentary, and all available games for important events.
Its news coverage is sometimes uneven; world-class events receive full coverage, but regional events depend on contributions from a network of correspondents. ('My thanks to A, B, C and everyone else who helped with the issue.')
ChessBase News is the home page of ChessBase.com, well known for its chess database and chess playing software.
Its news articles are mixed with feature articles related to ChessBase products, but the news is always straightforward and unbiased.
A few other news resources deserve special mention.
Google News can return all articles ('culled from approximately 4,500 news sources worldwide') which have the word 'chess' somewhere in the article.
The great majority of these articles are more about
than about chess. If you're patient, you'll find many local articles about chess events and players.
These are interesting in their own right, but they also let you measure the impact of chess in the great, wide world that surrounds the game of kings.
(What's Hot : children who compete with adults. • What's Not : any adult player who isn't named Kasparov; it's a rare regional champion who gets a writeup in the local rag.)
Finally, the rec.games.chess (rgc) newsgroups offer a peek into the court of public opinion on all things chess.
We use the Google interface to find rgc threads of interest.
Unfortunately, many threads quickly degenerate into name-calling or vulgarity, so there is a substantial learning curve to discover who's really knowledgeable and who's only talking off the top of his-or-her head.
Many of the articles contain the full text of copyrighted material lifted from other sources, making the rgc archives just as much a source for chess history as they are for chess news.
What about the Calendars? We linked to FIDE's calendar of major events, to the USCF's calendar of American events, to one of our own articles on how to find local events, and to four calendars listing tournaments from many countries (although with a focus on European events). Those four general calendars are not of equal value. We counted the events listed in each calendar for the months of June and July and came up with the numbers in the following table. Those two months, when many Europeans take their long summer vacations, offer the busiest chess schedules of the year.
Along with the count of events, we checked whether the calendars link to the official site for each event and found that they all do. They also display email addresses to contact the organizers of listed events. Finally, we checked whether the calendars offer a search across all listed events. They do indeed, although in different ways and on different search criteria. Harmen Jonkman's Chess Calendar (chess-calendar.nl) lists all months and all events on a single page, so you can use your browser's search function to find specific events.
Our next article on external links will cover Game Downloads. See you then! [All articles in this series may be found under Resource Reviews (see the link box at the top right corner of this article).] |
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