Mark Crowther and TWIC: 30 Years!

A milestone for one of the most important people and websites for modern chess.

I don’t think I knew about Mark Crowther’s wonderful website The Week in Chess (TWIC) for its first several years in existence, but when I did at some point in the late ‘90s it was gratitude at first sight. It is a tremendous resource to chess fans of practically every level, and still is: a great source of games as they’re being played, and helpfully collected and organized on a daily basis and then for the weekly editions of the TWIC download. Free!

Mark has been doing this every freakin’ week since mid-September of 1994. Back then Garry Kasparov and Anatoly Karpov were the World Champions, plural, and it was less than a year after Bobby Fischer’s weird return match with Boris Spassky. Most of you probably hadn’t been born or at least hadn’t learned to play chess. Magnus Carlsen was three years old, Vladimir Kramnik was still a chess player rather than an amateur sleuth doing “the procedure” to every third player, and dinosaurs had only recently gone extinct.

Anyway, the point is that it has been an absurdly long time, and the chess world owes him a great debt of gratitude - one which should every now and again be repaid with actual funds. (Maybe enough donations will let him substitute someone for him for a week and he can take a vacation somewhere, if he even knows how to do that.)

Thank you, Mark! Here’s a story about him and TWIC, and here’s a link to TWIC itself, a website you should all know about and use.