Australian chess history and publications (misc.)

[blackbishop]

The Gap Chess Club, Brisbane, is one of the few chess clubs to maintain an online archive which extends back to 1939 well before the inception of the club in late 1960s.
1939 was apparently the year in which the Singer Cup inter club competition began, although an inter club competition probably existed before that time.

https://old.thegapchessclub.org.au/i...nger-index.htm

Clicking on the year 1939, from the above website, gives an account of the first year of the new competition from two articles taken from the Courier Mail.
I remember playing a number of games in the Singer Cup competition and I greatly enjoyed the camaraderie. I wonder just who was Mr, Miss or Mrs Singer?
He or she is described as F G Singer in one of the Courier Mail articles and P E Singer in the other article.

The new Gap Chess Club website is: https://www.thegapchessclub.org.au/

[blackbishop]

The Box Hill Chess Club: http://www.boxhillchess.org.au/
has a games archive going back to 2012. All the games are playable online.

It has a newsletter archive going back to 2000. Box Hill newsletters actually go back a lot further than those archived.

The state Library of Victoria holds Victorian chess newsletters and magazines produced by:

• the Melbourne Chess Club (1970s-1980s)
• the Box Hill Chess Club (1960s-1980s)
• the Waverley Chess Club (1970s)
• the Monash Chess Club (1970s)
• the Kew Chess Club (1980s)

None of these would be available online.

[blackbishop]

https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/a...&searchLimits=

As a twelve year old, I walked the one kilometre or so from McKinnon to the Chess Club located in a church hall in Bentleigh, Victoria.
While I was attending that club, we fielded teams in the D and B grade inter club competitions. Thank you Robert Potts for all those lifts to distant chess clubs.

If I was a kid living in McKinnon today, I would most likely be enrolling in the online R J Shield competition starting on March 29.

[blackbishop]

Includes:

• NSW Champions
• NSW Lightning Champions
• NSW Womens Champions
• City of Sydney Champions
• NSW Country Champions
• NSW Country Teams Champions
• NSW Interclub Grade Match Winners
• Presidents of the NSWCA

plus winners of NSW tournaments dating back to 2013.


https://www.nswca.org.au/halloffame.php

[blackbishop]

State Champions dating back to 1895.
Reserves Champions
Seniors Champions
State Junior Champions
State Women's and Girls Champions
State Best Games

Past Tournament Archive
“Here you will find results of past tournaments played in Western Australia since 2003.”
You will also find Final Standings and Cross tables and winners under all the various rating categories of all major WA tournaments.

Chess Game Archive
“Here you will find an archive of games (PGN) played in important tournaments in Western Australia to play through. Please enjoy”

Under "Life Members" there are extensive descriptions of the work and achievements of those people who were granted life membership of the CAWA.

The CAWA also has an excellent monthly newsletter produced by Mike McGregor which does not appear to be currently archived.

http://www.cawa.org.au/

[blackbishop]

Under “History” can be found a background to the Tasmanian Championship and the Tasmanian Women’s Championship together with all manner of interesting statistics.

The Championship Honour Board gives a list of Tasmanian Champions and Tasmanian Senior champions.

A similar format with “Background” “Facts and Figures” and “Honour Board” is given for the Rapid Championship, Lightning Championship and Open Championship.

Under, “News and Games” are posted articles concerning local and international events and topics of interest dating back to 2015.

Under “Contact”, “Newsletter” they appear to have the games and chess problems in pgn format that appeared in their newsletters but not the newsletters themselves.

Under “Junior Chess” is a list of past Tasmanian Junior Champions from the inaugural event in 1959. There is also an account of the 2010 Australian Junior Championship
conducted in Hobart with well produced tournament bulletins including many of the games.


https://www.tasmanianchessassociation.org/championship

[blackbishop]

Honour Boards

South Australian Champions
“1868-1893 – H.Charlick
Henry Charlick [1845-1916] was acknowledged chess champion of South Australia for 25 years by common consent and by his pre-eminent ability.
He confirmed this rank by winning the Australian title in Adelaide in 1887 and by taking second place the next year in Melbourne. State Championship
tournaments began in 1894, after the foundation of the South Australian Chess Association in 1892, but Charlick never took part in these contests for the title he had relinquished.”

J Hilton is listed as being the first winner of a tournament for the South Australia Championship.

SA Women’s Champions, starting with one E Koshnitsky in 1964.

City of Adelaide Champions.

Checkmate Open Winners.
The Checkmate Fide Open is an important tournament held at the Chess Centre of South Australia.

Checkmate Challenger ( Under 1600) Winners

https://sachess.org.au/honour-boards/



Results

Under this unobtrusive heading lies a wealth of year by year information about past tournaments extending back to some Henry Charlick games from 1864. They consist mainly of pgn files of games with some cross tables and even some video.

http://sachess.org.au/results/


The South Australian Junior Chess League, which is affiliated with the Chess Association and runs junior chess in the state, has its own Honour Board. South Australian and City of Adelaide Junior Champions are listed under many age groups, the youngest champions being Under Six.

They also have a School Honour Board showing School Champions in both Primary and Secondary schools in many different divisions.

http://sajuniorchess.org/


The SACA produces a newsletter which does not appear to be archived.

[Kevin Bonham]

the main banner of which still pops up in various Hobart Chess Tournaments?

Not any more; we did use it to guide people to events for a while but I don't know its current whereabouts; I think our former Junior Chess Officer who is no longer involved with the TCA (but still doing a great job with the Chesskids Interschools) might have it.

[MichaelBaron]

Honour Boards

South Australian Champions
“1868-1893 – H.Charlick
Henry Charlick [1845-1916] was acknowledged chess champion of South Australia for 25 years by common consent and by his pre-eminent ability.
He confirmed this rank by winning the Australian title in Adelaide in 1887 and by taking second place the next year in Melbourne. State Championship
tournaments began in 1894, after the foundation of the South Australian Chess Association in 1892, but Charlick never took part in these contests for the title he had relinquished.”

J Hilton is listed as being the first winner of a tournament for the South Australia Championship.

SA Women’s Champions, starting with one E Koshnitsky in 1964.

City of Adelaide Champions.

Checkmate Open Winners.
The Checkmate Fide Open is an important tournament held at the Chess Centre of South Australia.

Checkmate Challenger ( Under 1600) Winners

https://sachess.org.au/honour-boards/



Results

Under this unobtrusive heading lies a wealth of year by year information about past tournaments extending back to some Henry Charlick games from 1864. They consist mainly of pgn files of games with some cross tables and even some video.

http://sachess.org.au/results/


The South Australian Junior Chess League, which is affiliated with the Chess Association and runs junior chess in the state, has its own Honour Board. South Australian and City of Adelaide Junior Champions are listed under many age groups, the youngest champions being Under Six.

They also have a School Honour Board showing School Champions in both Primary and Secondary schools in many different divisions.

http://sajuniorchess.org/


The SACA produces a newsletter which does not appear to be archived.

Fantastic job getting all the data together!
Particularly interested to see some games from old tournaments. Interesting how chess has changed!

[blackbishop]

My posts have been split again; I am beginning to feel like a bacterium engaging in binary fission.

These days, sex is positively dangerous, you can't go to the football, you can't go to the chess club or beach or cafe and there is nothing on TV.
What have people got left except reading about chess history and maybe playing in an online Chess tournament on Chess.com as I am doing tonight.

My aims in the Chess History posts are:

to show that chess history can be interesting, amusing and useful
to highlight the locations where people can obtain information about chess history
to suggest that more needs to be done to archive Australian Chess Magazines and newsletters

John Gray, recently deceased, was an influential person in Queensland chess. His Northern Newsletters are housed in the vaults of Trove or the Anderson Collection
but are not available online. Now apparently, no one at the CAQ knows who he was. I swear that I am going to pay the $16.50 for fifty pages and make them available online.

I would like to gently encourage the CAQ and those sleepy Victorians to do more archiving.

[Kevin Bonham]

[SIZE=3]
Under “History” can be found a background to the Tasmanian Championship and the Tasmanian Women’s Championship together with all manner of interesting statistics.

The Championship Honour Board gives a list of Tasmanian Champions and Tasmanian Senior champions.

A similar format with “Background” “Facts and Figures” and “Honour Board” is given for the Rapid Championship, Lightning Championship and Open Championship.

Note that a lot of the history reproduced there is copied (with my permission and encouragement!) from my Tasmanian Chess Titles thread here:

http://www.chesschat.org/showthread....n-Chess-Titles

... however, unlike the website version, the version here is continually kept up to date.

I'm very pleased that the TCA was able to keep the 2010 Australian Junior material online.

[blackbishop]

Champions_1895-2009.jpg

Patrick Byrom, a Queensland arbiter, chess organizer and former member of the CAQ Council, has provided the Honour Role
that appeared on an earlier version of the CAQ website. After leaving the CAQ Council in 2012, he continued to update the role up until 2012.

I have had to delete the grainy image of Dorothy Dibley in order to upload the Role.

1997- Stephen Solomon/Andrew Allen
1998- Stephen Solomon
1999- David Smerdon
2000: Blank
2001: Stephen Solomon
2002: Blank
2003- David Smerdon
2004- Not contested
2005: David Smerdon
2006: Stephen Solomon
2007: Stephen Solomon
2008: Anthony Truscott
2009: Ben Lazarus
2010: Yi Liu
2011: Stephen Solomon
2012: Stephen Solomon

[blackbishop]

The Role seems to confirm the theory that Garry Koshnitsky was a Queenslander.

Does anyone have a list of North Queensland Champions?

[blackbishop]

When I arrived in Rockhampton in 1977, the late Adrian Harding was running the Rockhampton Chess Club. Tom was a long term resident of the now defunct Etna Creek Prison
and Adrian had, for I don’t know how many years, been visiting the prison to give Tom a game of chess. Come time for the North Queensland Championship and Adrian had arranged
for Tom to get a weekend pass to play in the Championship. Tom was a strong player and likely won the North Queensland title multiple times.

Now I have discovered that Tom wrote a small book about the North Queensland Championships including “tournaments, games and statistics : including ratings, score tables, competitor lists,
newspaper columns and other matters as from Easter 1970."

The book resides in the State Library of Victoria. It might provide a basis for building up a list of North Queensland Champions and supply an interesting history of the event.

[blackbishop]

https://gardinerchess.com.au/gm-roge...roared-part-1/


https://gardinerchess.com.au/gm-roge...roared-part-2/