Headshots Crowther made of himself as he posted on his website from time to time. "I first posted games by hand in newsgroups."
"It actually pre-dated what we would call the World Wide Web," Crowther said. For them, "downloading TWIC" is as normal as checking their email. It clearly has been a labor of love, and a service known to just about any serious chess player. Over the years, he has published more than 2.4 million chess games with the chess community, without ever charging anything for it. "It actually pre-dated what we would call the World Wide Web."
And then I process the games against that with FIDE IDs and whatever naming system I use." "When I get the games," he said, "I compare the games with whatever naming system that organizers have against the list and make sure they match. They key part of Crowther's processing is that the names of all the thousands of players are written consistently, and correctly. For about a decade now all my PGN files have FIDE IDs so that they can easily be transformed into a database with a different naming system if necessary." "I think that’s one of my biggest contributions," he said. "Then I compile a list of all the players in the tournament and I find their FIDE ID number which I add to the PGN."Ĭrowther is proud that, these days, major chess websites include these tags in their PGN files as well. "I find out where the results are going to be, I find out the dates and times of all the rounds, feed that into a computer and then I transfer them to the web," he explains. TWIC is not just a collection of games it's the processing that Crowther does that has added value. "I never go to bed on a Monday without finishing TWIC," Crowther said. Apart from a few times in the early years, he hasn't missed a single week. These days they come out on Monday nights, without exception. Since September 17, 1994, Crowther has posted almost 1,300 issues-that round number will be out in three weeks. It was an early example of chess and the internet being made for each other. "I never go to bed on a Monday without finishing TWIC. He is always in for a chat on Skype, and a few days before the interview he said he was "looking forward to it." It characterizes the cheerful personality of the man who single-handedly changed the chess world a quarter of a century back, when he started publishing his weekly chess magazine The Week In Chess (TWIC). Mark Crowther, the publisher of the site, is from Clayton, a suburb of Bradford in northern England. The first issue was published 25 years ago today. The Week In Chess is a household name in the chess world and still the place to find the latest chess games, altogether and nicely sorted, for download.