The Appeal of Informant

A question was raised in social media: does anyone still use Informant? As the question was in response to me, having claimed that Informant is the chess periodical that I read more than any other, I took the question as a personal challenge. I like the books, but now am more likely to read them on my computer screen while jotting notes in the print edition.

In the early days of Chess Informant, it was a vital source of games for readers. It no longer serves that purpose. We can watch them as they are played and have several ways to access them after they finish. What, then, is the appeal of Informant today?

My first Informant was number 64. I acquired it as I was getting into correspondence chess after a brief effort two decades earlier. One of the games in that issue gave substance to the concept of flexibility.* That game helped my planning and positional judgement in a correspondence game that I won (see the game at "Playing by the Book"). Of course, there are many ways to get access to games that will help one play correspondence chess. That Informant did this for me may have been no more than coincidence. It was what I was using for study. Is there anything inherent in the publication that makes it more useful than other resources for such a purpose?

More recently in another correspondence game I had Black in the French Defense and was facing a frightening appearing pawn storm. We were still in book, so I did a search of my database containing all games published in Informant for the position before me. There were more than one hundred games. Over the course of the weekend, I played through all of these games on my computer screen. Our game diverged from the databases a couple of moves later, and yet ten moves later I was developing plans based on a game I had seen that weekend. My memory of the game had errors—I incorrectly remembered had been played by Viktor Kortschnoj. Even so, I went on to win. Of course, a search of ChessBase Mega that controlled by rating would have given me most of these games and more, along with the same benefits.

Less is More

Chess Informant's system of signs and language-less annotations contribute both to its appeal and limit its usefulness to many players. Chess players looking to improve often crave annotations expressed in words more than variations. These are vital for explaining concepts that must be absorbed in order to play well. However, words can distract as well.

When I was trying to improve as a C-Class player in the late-1990s and early 2000s, I became aware that my interior dialogue while playing tournament chess reflected a great deal of confusion. I did not lack ideas. Rather, I spent much of my thinking time on ideas that were unproductive. I examined lines that a master would immediately reject, but that seemed good to me. Learning the Informant system of signs and investing time reading through annotated games in that periodical helped me to quiet this internal dialogue. Chess analysis in Informant offers less, not more. Only critical lines at important moments are offered. The ideas that can be expressed through the system of signs are few, but they are important. If an idea cannot be expressed through these symbols, perhaps it should be discarded. Through the first decade of this century, my rating rose over 400 points. I was in my 40s. Informant was not the only tool that facilitated my rise, of course, but it was important. Several memorable successes are tied to Informant.

Informant today offers less in another way that maintains its appeal to me. It contains only quality games and analysis. Each Monday, Mark Crowther releases another issue of The Week in Chess with recent games from important tournaments. The last issue of 2022, number 1468, contained 7201 games. Number 1469, the first of 2023, set a record for quantity with 10,627 games. TWIC is a terrific resource and I keep my database of all TWIC more or less up-to-date. I don't know who, if anyone, succeeds in going through all of these games. Some selection is necessary. 

Informant culls a small sample from this mass of data, but every game merits attention. Usually the annotations are light, but some of the lines go deep. For a substantial number of games in each issue, several other recent games or game fragments are embedded in the annotations.

Aesthetics

Chess Informants are attractive books. Through something more than the first 100 issues, little changed on the cover except the colors. The design was spare, economical, and highlighted the global nature of chess culture. The "new Informants", however, each have a unique cover design. Sometimes these are colorful and whimsical. Sometimes the connection to chess is not explicit, such as the Spaghetti Western influenced cover of Informant 128 (see "Determination"). Sometimes, there is a puzzle quality to the cover. I won a copy of Chess Informant Paramount (a software package with Informants 1-123 and indices) by correctly identifying the image and context of the cover of Informant 125--the issue title was "Enigma" and the image was of part of the hardware used by the Bletchley Park codebreakers who cracked Nazi Germany's Enigma code. The most recent, CI 156 Mesmerized, has an image of the sky and clouds with shades of blue, orange, and white. It provokes the imagination.

*The notion of flexibility as an important strategic principle entered my thinking more soundly when I read Dan Heisman, Elements of Positional Evaluation, rev. ed. (1999) several years later, but the foundation was built by productive study of Informant 64.