Congratulations to Chess Today!

Big congratulations to the team of Chess Today! It is their 3,000th daily e-chess newsletter! Well done everyone!

For those of you who follow my blog regularly, I am sure you noticed that I mentioned quite a few times that Chess Today a great daily online chess newsletter with plenty of excellent chess analysis, puzzles, news, etc.

To subscribe to Chess Today, visit their website at www.ChessToday.net.

Chess Today reaches No. 3000!
by GM Alex Baburin

With this issue Chess Today has reached yet another milestone. Today I want to thank all members of our team for their hard work and dedication. I also want to express my gratitude to our readers for their continuous support. I hope that together we will break many more records!

I got the idea of producing a daily chess newsletter sometime in 2000, while flying from Dublin to Copenhagen. Whether it was the altitude or the abundance of free time, but I always had great brain-storming sessions during flights. Perhaps ‘free’ drinks (those were the pre-Ryanair times) also contributed to my creative thinking! ☺ Anyhow, I decided that there were so many interesting chess news and games in contemporary chess, that it would be enough to fill up a newsletter even on a daily basis! For speed and low cost that newsletter had to be an e-mail one.

I put that idea to test during the Chess Olympiad in Istanbul in the end of 2000. How I managed to play in the Olympiad, produce first CT issues and have them sent over painfully slow Internet connections of that time, is still beyond me! Chess Today was really well received and after a couple of weeks we had about 200 readers.

Our readership has been steadily growing since then. If Chess Today taught me one thing it must be (the art of) delegating. I am a perfectionist by nature and, as many people in that group, I often felt that all work had to be done by me and me only – otherwise it would not be good enough. There was certain arrogance in that. I am happy to admit now that CT contributors and editors proved me wrong on so many occasions that they cured me of that misconception!

Producing a daily newsletter creates many challenges – the main one is lack of time for revision and reflection. For a while now I’ve been considering some changes to CT format and content, based on the feedback I received from our readers and contributors. One area in urgent need of attention is our website, which fell behind badly. The other is getting a dedicated server with our own e-mail distribution.

Marketing and promotion is another part of Chess Today requiring a radical overhaul. There are lots of challenges and opportunities ahead, but I trust the Chess Today will be up for them!