Congratulations to Jeffrey Roland of Boise, Idaho, who has assumed 100% of the editorial duties of Northwest Chess magazine. Last summer I made a commitment to the NWC Board to remain involved with the magazine until a new Editor could be hired and trained. I am happy to report that my job is done.
I will let the Northwest Chess Business Manager, Eric Holcomb, take it from here...
"On behalf of everyone at Northwest Chess, I’d like to welcome you to another year of chess activity, albeit a month late since you won’t be reading this until around the end of January. 2012 was a big year, highlighted by the U.S. Open in Vancouver, Washington. I was unable to attend, but Frank Niro stepped up as Interim Editor to produce a wonderful 48-page special edition of Northwest Chess for those who did attend. By the end of the year, Jeff Roland of Idaho took over as Editor, and he’s doing a great job; probably the most dedicated editor we’ve ever had! Jeff has also spearheaded the inclusion of the Idaho Chess Association as a full partner in Northwest Chess, and Idaho joined the Northwest Chess Grand Prix in 2012. (The 2012 GP was named in honor of Ralph Hall; the 2013 GP will likely be named in honor of Elena Donaldson Akhmylovskaia.)
Back issues of Northwest Chess are now available in full color as PDF files three months after publication, and a total of about 300 issues of Northwest Chess and Washington Chess Letter dating back to 1947 are now available online, with the expectation that we’ll add about another 100 issues this year. Take a look; some of these back issues are quite interesting, even if you’re a bit rusty on the old descriptive chess notation. Included in the 300 issues are all the 1972 magazines with the Fischer-Spassky world championship games. Speaking of games, Jeff is also compiling PGN and ChessBase files of games appearing in Northwest Chess beginning last December. This makes it much easier if you would like to follow and analyze the printed games with your favorite chess software.
(Click on the “Games” tab on the NWC website to access this feature.)
Beginning this year, the new Northwest Chess blog at http://www.nwchess.com/blog/ will be the primary means of reporting many local tournament results, aside from the official USCF crosstables, which will usually be linked to in the blog post. The change in reporting will free up my time to perform other tasks, while providing much greater flexibility in tournament reporting since blog posts can be longer and can be written by multiple bloggers with greater knowledge of the events they report on. If you would like to be a NWC blogger, please let me know."
February 2013 online color .pdf file can be downloaded here.
