Echesspedia

I have always been concerned by the lack of information on FIDE and chess history. Unfortunately except for some rich archive materials, which are lying somewhere in FIDE’s garage, there is very little. FIDE is neither able nor equipped to produce any marketing material or concrete information related to its past. Once this realisation hit me, I decided to write more about chess history: the history of the world chess championships and the history of the Olympiad, I believe it is now time to produce something, something which will show and cover the rich history of chess people as well as the history of the people who were involved in it’s advancement.
My main idea is to provide information for a yearly encyclopaedia similar to Microsoft Encarta. Once my job is done – after some technical development, editing and support, – we shall be able to publish a DVD or a web enabled support system.

In April 1999 I started with some of my colleagues from Russia, to process data on chess events, statistics, personalities, and pictures. We have travelled to Germany, France, Switzerland, Russia and Holland to collect those records and we still need to find and accumulate many more. Since that period I have had two to three people, working part-time for me to process the selected data. Probably this project will have no limit in time because our history is so rich and chess is still progressing. The main difficulty, allow me to reiterate, is to locate and process project-related data.

The main part of the Encyclopaedia should take a year to complete however, it will not be finished unless I find some technical and financial support. However a more deep project (phase two) is already developing.

So far, I have financed everything with an amount reaching more then seventy-five thousands dollars not including my time and my involvement. To speed the production I will need to involve more people involved. Two are good for one project, but I can’t ask them to work on four of the projects at the same time.
Once done we shall go for software programming which will link data between automatically and make the full system user-friendly.

Approaching to the end of the first release, I have started to look for some great names who will help me to promote the product. My first contact was with Anatoly Karpov, the World Champion 1975-1985 and 1997-1999. The second was multiple and last World Computer Software Champion Junior. Both names and their active involvement will undoubtedly give a big boost to the final product and help it to reach millions of users around the world has the Chess Master software in the last 10 years with a far inferior product.