[archive]

Disinformator™ 39: the health warning

The 39th step in the Disinformator journey sees coverage of major events such as London (December), Vienna (August), and the Staunton tournament in London - all of which sets the reader up nicely for a review of the first part of the pre-Christmas panto that is the Oxford District chess leagues, and its scope for drama, Kellyrama, and (of course) blunderama.

Archive of past issues

	#38: February 2009 2008 was a bit of blur, frankly, so Disinformator took some time off to reassess its policy, focus and direction... ... and, frankly, came back with more of the same in 2009. A review of the year that Disinformator nearly forgot is included, neatly sandwiched between resident GM Hannon's tutorial and Kieran Smallbone's explanation of the new QI ranking system, which, long term, is the only equitable way to deal with the anomalies in the BCF / FIDE time-space ranking continuum.
	#37: December 2007 A festive beer and cheer issue designed to take the edge off a year in which anything that could go wrong did go wrong... at my board, where Will’s 2. Nh3 in the French doesn’t quite make it to Chessbase, but helped write a tournament winner’s cheque while proving just how futile a gesture the possession of a decent opening repertoire in Oxfordshire represents nowadays....
	#36: December 2006 2006 was the year in which the magazine dip-stick tested the idea of whether one could (a) get a life;and (b) continue to write a magazine on a regular basis. The answer seems to be "no", but by Christmas we decided to continue the split the difference and ended up with the life sentence that is the annual magazine with added colour and couture inserts, while Will and Dave showed that just because your age has a 0 in the unit column doesn’t mean you can’t win a tournament or write a book review.
	#35: May 2006 May 2006 saw the end of another successful season at the 4NCL – who would have thought of a social chess scene back then – but also this year the sadness of remembering Pete Harrison – the original of the Woody Woodpushing species. Achieving 4NCL Div 2 mid-table, and City 1 winning the services of Kieran Smallbone to lift the Frank Wood shield led to some impressively sane chess, so it was left to the Mortar V Pestle match to provide the quality opening repertoires as Pete would have liked it: 1. Na3 d5; 2. f4 g5; 3. e4 dxe4; 4. fxg5 ...
	#34: December 2005 And once again we're back in Santa territory ... with 4NCL, knights to remember, Gricewatch UK and a game by Steinitz almost appearing, it's clearly time to go home and wait for the fat man to get stuck in the chimney...
	#33: May 2005 And it's back to normal numeracy at Disinformator HQ, while the Oxford contingent goes to Cork 2005 in search of a beer and a bunfight - and gets both. Kelly Riley is somehow overlooked in the battle for the next Pope.... it's enough to make a grown man ... order another bun.
	#32a: February 2005 ... in which we try to re-set the counting clock, but already it's probably too late to recover sanity, as the post-Zhang age of chess has been ushered in quietly (at least, quietly at first) in Witney... but for the time being, the chess world carries on as if nothing has happened.
	#32: December 2004 And in a flash of inspiration, we made it to Christmas 2004 while making a world record attempt in the errata stakes - managing this time to skip Episode 31 of the Disinformator Chronicles entirely...
	#30: March 2004 Kidlington 2004 and the lads are raring to go ... meanwhile Oxford turn out to be doing quite well in the 4NCL, while Simon King provides a problem on one page, and the same solutions (Qxh7) on another
	#29: December 2003 Readers wondering why the magazine hadn't gone the way of the electric typewriter, the drawn rook and pawn ending and the Antarctic ice-shelf might now recall that sometime around here it was decided to shelve the county leagues and enter a team into the 4NCL ... and always curious to find out where Jeff Astle played his football, it was time to get on the West Bromwich chess & gravy train...
	#28: September 2003 Another pre-season production, with a front cover that has yet to be reported to FIDE but hope springs eternal...
	#27: April 2003 It's post-Kidlington 2003, and with the editorial crew succumbing to the temptation of playing decent tournament chess, it was just as well Pete Harrison was around to provide the in-house bauhaus tournament coverage from the back of the Kidlington to Oxford bus. Meanwhile, Ozeren - Smallbone scoops the best game award while the Christmas Caption competition is decided...
	#26: December 2002 And now it's Christmas 2002, and time for a quiz-z-z, Tim D takes a posh break (“sabbatical”) and will investigates the miniature
	#25: October 2002 It's back to school time folks - and with Capablanca featuring on the cover (yes, fresh from Hull...) and on page 2, this cna only mean one thing; the advent of the Kelly Riley phase of the magazine, with some sparkling events at St Hildas to wow the audience, the crowd and the OCA postal arbiters. Will chess ever be the same as it ever was?
	#24: May 2002 ... brings us to May 2002, and it's post-Kidlington time once more, and almost around this time an Oxford Univ tournament is starting to flex its muscle into the local calendar.
	#23: December 2001 Well, it's December 2001 now, the magazine having gone into hibernation in May 2000 - and it's hard now to recall what useful service to society was achieved by this break from reporting - except, perhaps, an absence of reporting. No doubt the idea behind the current format was a noble one - to paraphrase something that Tartakover might never have said “the beauty of a magazine lies is the ideas you've forgotten for writing it in the first place”. Still, it was good to get back into the scheme of things.....
	#22: May 2000 A bumper issue ... if you like cartoons (Matt R), linoprints (Phil V), chorus girls and postcards - and a Game of the Year (if you really want to tweak the pieces).
	#21: March 2000 Is chess a team game? It is when you're playing at Kidlington for the right to buy pints with the proceeds of any team prize; meanwhile Master Smallbone resorts to what's described as a 'slimy swindle' to knock City 2 out of the cup, which is worth a gander, while the magazine announces a game-of-the-year wheeze ...
	#20: December 1999 It's twilight and goodnight to the 20th century, and just enough time to squeeze in another edition, thanks to the contributions of Ed and Will, who may have left for fairer fields (Gloucester, Brixon) but the pull of chess infamy is strong and hard to resist. First pictures of the Fir Tree disaster renovation appear on the front cover, alongside a bus accident.
	#19: October 1999 Magazines in October were possible in the old days - and this one kicked off the lead-up to the new Millennium - was it worth it? Who knows.... (the Millennium, that is).
	#18: May 1999 Our millennial predictions of the End of History come unstuck with a fin-de-saison wine and cheese episode which sees summaries of a successful year's drinking, the incorporation of a few photographs in the text, and some game commentaries. Meanwhile, the major shock is the relevation that someone actually reads through the new games section, as Mike March takes the reader in short order on a trip through the schoolboy archives of an earlier edition... from Hull to hell. From ho to hum.
	#17: March 1999 The post-Kidlington hangover special, with pictures of various people looking cheerful on the front cover, disguising what is quite a busy edition, with reviews of the Adam Raouf tournaments (Dec 1998) thrown in for good measure; in short it's a sickening chessfest without a decent scandal to report on. The end can only be nigh - or even nigher.
	#16: December 1998 ... and before disappearing to China in a haze of post-match bar late-November analyses, out comes the Christmas 1998 edition, with the second colour front page and a new crop of Univ kids - the names of Smallbone and Savage make their near first appearance in the Disinformator ledger of shame. Meanwhile, the imminent arrival of the likes of Palliser IM bearing administrative and social gifts will soon rid the Univ of pariah status, thus leaving the magazine with nothing much more to do than publish games from yesterday, starting with the excellent event that was the Hull School Championships, 1968...
	#15: October 1998 The modern chess reader might need reminding that chess used to be about something other than what a German-sounding computer program thinks about when you inadvertently press the analysis button, and the 15th in the Disinformator chronicles has plenty of stuff - in the old days, we used to celebrate winning things, go to AGMs, and generally put the boot in on some other club (here: the University). And go to chess congresses. Bloody hell, how naive is that?? Meanwhile Mike March breaks ranks and introduces some Hull-inspired reminiscences from the 1960s...
	#14: May 1998 Augustine writes about learning to play chess at 52, Ed Horton blasts off about odd behaviour the dread word Disinformator makes its first appearance somewhere, and on the cover it shows that once upon a time the club played consultation games (but not twice upon a time...) ... loads of old games at the back without annotation start to mark the development of style - what would Charles Darwin have made of it... (join us in a few weeks for the next phase, when the front cover goes colour).
	#13: March 1998 A post-Kidlington special edition, with a favourite Will swindle on page 2, and the first downing of the Horton-Kitchlew by Will, "a masterpiece ... of flow with a dollop of flow and a slice of geometry" ... and ending 48. Qgg8# [sic]. The Editor sets the standard with a win against a future GM - if you're going to do so, get 'em when they're 7 is what we say. Plenty of stuff here, but no table of contents.
	#12: December 1997
	#11: October 1997 A 50s cartoon of Tony Wyeth adorns the cover and inside the Fir Tree story starts to unfold, with a certain Kelly Kibitzer (semi-detached, Oxford Lager) making up the numbers... Oxfordshire win the Minor Counties, and there's a club profile of Peter Ball, book reviews, and some club history (courtesy some minute books from the 1900s...)
	#10: May 1997 May 1997 and City cause a stir by winning the championships; plenty of diagrams on the front cover, but no pictures as yet. Will gets to being 2 pawns up but with four pieces en prise... the first mention of the Chequered Board is made. Matt Rose loses on time to Mickey Adams a queen + bishop to the good while Gary Kasparov fails to duff Deep Blue.
	#9: March 1997 Post-Kidlington another slim issue, but richer in content. and now that Will is in charge of the diagrams we're getting a few more of them right. Ed Horton had a good Kidlington (beating a Cobb and a Hunt) while Peter Ball produced a classic mating combination... Will leaves about three pieces en prise on page 4.
	#8: January 1997 ... the first of the slimline series - amazing what the absence of a photocopier does to one - sees the first appearance of local GM Hannon marching his king up the board to secure victory in the opening, in Sussex (must have been the Battle of Hastings air)... Laurence Hunt makes an appearance, as does Leonard Barden. Suggestions that a proofreading Burt might have taken a hand... thin, and post-Christmas. At least there isn't a page 16a.
	#7: December 1996 Right into the Disaster-mater jungle - with the front page missing the point entirely. A snap self-mate loses its point when the move played (Rb5) is represented as Rb4. A "page 16a" problem surfaces in the editorial and refuses to go away for a few issues. A particularly amusing game, if gruesome memory, is the Editor's so-nearly loss against a BCF 51 player. "Later in the pub Will found ..." a few pints of beer and some improvements, and this becomes a standard annotation for a few issues to come... - but no immediate cure for sciatica and redundancy...
	#6: October 1996 The first of a series of magazines that threaten to lurch towards Disaster-mater status, as the editor heads towards Golders Green with 1. Nc3 and 2. h4 and thinks that people will be interested. They might be, but can they understand the rendition of moves (hand-typing the order of the day) - good article by the (then) Ed Horton - but in the end if we are to rely on Will and Ed on providing the balance that sort of gives the game away.
	#5: Summer hols 1996 Well, it's summer hols 1996 and the front cover shows a Univ player win the Frank Wood shield after building a sandcastle blockade against the enemy; clearly Sean and Will hadn't better things to do that May as Revenge of the Pixie articles and Quickplay tournament stuff predominates. The fascination with league tables hadn't worn off; it takes a while to find more interesting things to do with tables...
	#4: March 1996 The first of the post-Kidlington chess writing festivals, March 1996, although in truth only 2 of the 14 named games come from that tournament. "For the third magazine in the row ... Kf5 does the trick". Simon Charles appears in print for the first time winning a game from the editor and being rewarded with a dodgy font. A flash front cover sees Mssrs Burt and Wittmann do flash things with queens on the g-file.
	#3: Spring 1996 Well, it's Spring 1996 and time to unfurl some new-style diagrams courtesy Will Burt, who has reflected since that it was "about this issue that I realised that Sean would publish anything". Gabor Batonyi causes a stir by castling while sacrificing a queen. Articles by Mssrs Horton, Jarvis, Burt and Terry, and no page numbering a bit of a flaw if you plan to rescue the edition from the cat litter.
	#2: Christmas 1995 Emboldened for no reason that comes to the mind of memory, here's what appeared in some people's Christmas socks later that year. Bold boys, all. Meantime, there wasn't an editorial, just a "round-up", and already the controversy was "off". 6 games involving Mssrs Wittmann, Rose, Horton, Nixon, Westphalen ... all no doubt writhing in the background. 2 match reports a problem corner and (touchingly) some Errata.
	#1: Winter 1995 And with the words, Instead of an Editorial, we were off on the journey. But as everyone knows by now, most people wouldn't have started from here. Three games, 5 puzzles and very large font. The 90s... a style nightmare