2002-08-18 - 11:49 p.m.

A Dying Art?

Yesterday in the mail, I got something that didn't exactly please me. It was the latest issue of the New York State Chess Association magazine.

Two years ago I wrote an article on a New York State Championship that was held 60 years ago that was probably the strongest tournament played in the Western Hemisphere that year. I did a lot of research on the article, and I even found a lot of previously unpublished games from the event. The article was rather long, so the magazine started publishing it in chapters. I was pleasantly surprised when the article won an award from the national chess journalists' organization.

However, after I won the award, the state magazine didn't seem that interested in continuing to print the chapters. They'd skip an issue or two, and when they did print the article, they'd only print one or two pages.

Here it is, over two years later and they are only about half finished printing it. The latest issue I got did not have any more of my article. Instead, it had an article by the current Editor-In-Chief, analyzing two of his own games. There was also another lengthy article from the FUTURE Editor-In-Chief, analyzing a bunch of HIS games. Well, at least they weren't all wins. There was also an article by a nine-year-old boy, analyzing a couple of his games. Granted, this nine-year old is one of the strongest players his age group in the country, but still, the strongest nine-year-old in the United States is still only a little stronger than yours truly. After all, he's NINE FRIGGING YEARS OLD!!

I have some pretty mixed feeling here. Obviously, I'm pissed off, but I'm not sure if I have a right to be. My article was 40+ pages long, which is a tough thing to fit in to a magazine that's only around 30 pages an issue (at best) and that comes out four times a year. On the other hand, I would think that an article featuring grandmaster games that had won a national award for the magazine would have a priority over self-aggrandizing and self-congratulatory pieces by the editorial staff who, let's face it, are not really players of any renown or distinction.

I also have mixed feelings about the guy who's the Editor-In-Chief of the magazine. I think he's done sort of a slipshod job, and the magazines he's edited have been, except for my articles, among the least interesting issues of the entire run. On the one hand, he has been scrupulously getting the magazines out on time, something his predecessors were hard-pressed to do, but there really isn't that much IN the magazines he's edited. He has also devoted far too many pages to his own games.

On the other hand, at least he did the job and produced the magazines. Being Editor-In-Chief of a state chess magazine is the very definition of a thankless job. It has very low pay, and in general you get a lot more complaints than compliments. Time and time again I've been tempted to try to take over his job, since I'm sure I could do a better job and they'd grab anyone who volunteered, but always I force myself to shut up and sit on my hands. It looks like it requires a lot of time and effort for very little reward, and I really don't need something like that in my life right now.

Of course, now that this fellow is yielding up the editorial reins, the magazine may improve... or it may not. My feeling is that the new guy will be even LESS inclined to finish publishing my article, since he doesn't know me from Adam.

Oh, let's have a pity party for poor Mr. Hamster, who won't get the end of his article published!

Ah, me.

This actually got me thinking about how this is a hard time for American chess, and for American chess magazines. Right now I subscribe to five local American chess magazines, and of the five three of them are in trouble. The states I subscribe to are: Illinois, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts (New England, actually), and Northwest (Washington and Oregon).

Illinois is doing fine, New York is doing as I just described. I guess I'd call both of them healthy since they are regularly producing magazines when they say they are going to.

I just started subscribing to the Northwest Chess magazine. I'd heard a lot of good things about it, but I'm not that impressed with what I've seen so far. While it's the only monthly state magazine I've seen, the issues are very thin and printed on the cheapest paper possible. They are also a little thin editorially - one issue only had two chess games in it, and both of those were from 1946! When this was pointed out to the Editor-In-Chief, he complained that nobody was sending him games. Alas, this is a problem I am all too familiar with. I've come up with a partial solution: I go to the actual tournaments and practically grab the scoresheets out of the players' hands!!

Sometimes, you have to be a little more proactive, but I recognize times are tough.

The Massachusetts magazine, Chess Horizons is a bi-monthly magazine, and of higher quality than the New York mag, but it has been having troubles recently. They seem to have trouble keeping an editor, and they have been skipping issues here and there.

And then there is the New Jersey magazine. Once, it was one of the better ones, better than New York's, but I haven't seen an issue of it for almost a year. They are having severe difficulties. I was talking with some of the directors of the state federation when I was down in New Jersey in February and they, too, are having a hard time keeping an editor. I think they actually had one die on them! However, they have a new web site!!!

And that might be the heart of the problem right there: the internet.

The internet seems to be bleeding a lot of activity from American chess. There are probably a lot more games played online now than in real life in the U.S.A. I remember reading some years ago that over 50,000 games were being played every day at the Internet Chess Club. I'll bet it's well over 100,000 a day now.

In some ways, the proliferation of chess over the internet is a good thing for chess as a whole. It's probably true that there are simply a lot more games of chess being played now, and because they are being played online a lot more of them are being SAVED now. However, to a certain extent everyone who is playing chess online is one more person who is not going to chess tournaments out in the real world. The numbers of people playing over the board chess in the U.S. has been slowly but steadily shrinking over the last several years.

Part of this is the fault of the U.S. Chess federation, which seems to be mainly run by a bunch of idiots. A recent president of the federation made a public pronouncement that over-the-board chess was all but dead! Thanks for the promotional help, pal! I'd like to report that was the stupidest thing done by his administration, but sadly, it isn't by a long shot.

In some ways I can understand why this is so. Why go to the trouble and expense of setting aside a weekend to play in a chess tournament, when you can sit down at your computer and in a few minutes be playing a game with a master from Brazil? However, playing chess over the internet and playing a real person over the board is just not the same experience. Also, there is a very real problem with playing chess over the Internet - the master from Brazil could be a 12-year-old boy cheating with a chess computer. There is no reliable way to weed out online cheaters.

A few months ago there were rumors that Bobby Fischer was playing chess online, but it turned out to be some smartaleck cheating with a chessplaying computer.

You know, even though the number of over-the-board players has shrunk somewhat, things are NOWHERE near as bad as they were in the early 1950s. Back then the U.S. Chess Federation only had about 1,000 members, and if there were any local or state publications, they consisted of a couple of mimeographed sheets stapled together, and they came out twice a year, if that.

So things aren't nearly as bad as all that. However, I will say that it seems to be harder to reverse a downward trend than it is to start from the bottom. The long, hard climb is that much tougher when you've already been to the top of the mountain.

Maybe the Internet IS going to kill over the board play. Maybe the Internet IS going to make most small publishing concerns (like little chess magazines) obsolete.

Speaking of which...

While I was looking for more cool local chess magazines to subscribe to, I noticed that Michigan's chess magazine looked pretty good. However, it would be kind of silly to subscribe to it when I can print out the most recent issue for free, off their web site!

Maybe they need to think about their web presence a little more carefully...