The big 100

Chess Informant no. 100

Exclusive interview with editor-in-chief Aleksandar Matanovic
by Peter Doggers of Chess Vibes

Recently, the famous Chess Informant reached a milestone: edition no. 100 was published. Facts, figures and an exclusive interview with 77-year-old editor-in-chief Aleksandar Matanovic.

Forty-two years ago, in the former Yugoslavia, some chess enthousiasts had a few interesting ideas. They wanted to collect the most distinguished chess games from all major events, and publish them. For this, they established a “chess language” – an international code akin to those used in mathematics and music, equally understandable to chessplayers all over the globe. Lastly, they subsitituted traditional opening names with a classification of chess openings based on evaluation of all the available hitherto played games. In 1966, the first volume of Chess Informant was published.

Within a few years, their publication (also called “Informator”) became the one and only chess bible (or should we say: bibles?) for travelling chess professionals, who in those days were known to carry more chess books than clothes in their suitcases, something we can hardly imagine in the digital era.

ECOAs a solution for the growing piles of Informants, the Yugoslavs at some point started to publish their equally famous Encyclopaedias of Chess Openings (”ECO”), in five separate volumes. In the seventies and eighties, these were the books you could find in most GM’s suitcases, and all pages would be cluttered with pencil notes, with updates or personal additions to analysis and evaluations.

Here is the full article and interview.