For large chunks of its history, Chess Life and Review was provincial, very slow

to report on international events, and aimed at a very low readership in terms

of skill. There was no internet though, and it had something pretty close to a m
onopoly in the United States, so strong club players (and up) were stuck. We cou
ld get the Informant twice a year (pretty late), and some lucky few of us could
occasionally get photocopies of tournament bulletins Walter Browne would bring f
rom overseas.
It was this vacuum that Yasser Seirawan's Inside Chess filled in a wonderful way
from 1988 to 2000. For most of its run, the magazine came out every two weeks,
and it included tournament reports from all over the world, with a special focus
on super-tournaments. Sometimes Seirawan himself was a participant in those tou
rnaments, but whether he was or not the reports were timely, colorful, and full
of games commented on by the man himself. As an elite grandmaster, he certainly
knew what he was talking about, and what was even better was his commentary styl
e.
Seirawan could sling variations with the best of them, but his commentaries were
primarily verbal. They were lively, insightful, and highly opinionated. Seirawa
n was no respecter of persons when it came to annotating a move, and if a move o
ffended his aesthetic sensibilities he could award it a "??", even if it was pla
yed (and praised!) by Garry Kasparov. One may dispute Seirawan's judgments, but
because of his forthrightness the reader is engaged and will both learn and be e
ntertained.
The magazine wasn't just Seirawan, though it was his baby. Many other players on
both sides of the Atlantic helped out over the years, most of all American (by
way of Bulgaria) IM Nikolay Minev, who wrote numerous articles from opening theo
ry to chess history to various subtle tactical themes. (Others include GMs John
Nunn, Nigel Short and Walter Browne; IMs Jeremy Silman, John Donaldson and Zoran
Ilic, and there were many many more.) Nor was the magazine only games and analy
sis: there were tournament reports (with pictures and crosstables), interviews,
discussions of chess politics, news briefs (often fascinating, as we see players
who are famous today making their first tiny splashes on the world scene), and
ads. (You might think of it as a sort of non-glossy, biweekly version New In Che
ss.)
That there were advertisements shouldn't be surprising - bills must be paid. But
one might not expect them to have survived into the current product. As an Amer
ican who remembers many of the tournaments, companies and products advertised fr
om the time, they have a small nostalgic value to me, but in all honesty a forma
t that eliminated them wouldn't have bothered me a bit. The format, however, giv
es us no choice: what we have are PDFs of scanned hard copies of the magazine's
issues.
There are three disks in the set: one for 1988-1990, a second for 1991-1995, and
a third for 1996-2000. Each issue has its own PDF file, and while the issues ar
e searchable the games can't be successfully copied-and-pasted into ChessBase. T
wo handy features are a pair of PDFs: one with an index for the whole series, th
e other concatenating all 284 issues' tables of contents. Not ideal, perhaps, bu
t a decent compromise to having one gigantic PDF that would take a long time to
load and search.
Maybe the product could have been better, but even so I'm very glad to own a cop
y, and I can heartily recommend it to chess fans everywhere and of all strengths
(especially but not only to those rated over 1700-1800), and to fans of chess o
f history.