Six year’s on from the explosion in chess interest stimulated by the Spassky-Fischer World Championship match of 1972, Wanstead & Woodford Chess Club is thriving. Time to start a Club mag! But turn back the clock: no computers then, except Companies’ ‘main frames’; the home computer revolution is still a few years away and chess analysis engines will not play to a respectable level until the 1990s. So magazines have to be typed – with a type writer onto paper – and games had to be analysed in one’s head, not a ‘chess engine’. To start with, we also did not have access to a photocopier to run off bulk printings, but did have access to a spirit duplicator with the assistance of Andrew Kinder. So the early issues were this blotchy blue print.
Games published in First Rank are being added to a modern database as we go along and will be available to readers either to play through on screen on the website, or to download in pgn format. We have updated the analysis with some up-to-date chess engine analysis; see how our efforts in the mag compare with ‘the engine’ now, remembering, of course, that you are comparing the analysis of club players with the GM-class analysis of modern engines. You can choose to download the pgn files and go through them with your own pgn reader and engine, or you can play through them on screen on the website.
The progress of publication can be found in the line below this paragraph, which will update as issues are added.
Latest published issue: Vol 4 No 1