Correspondence Chess History

[Tim Harding]

Can we start a new thread or area of the board for Correspondence Chess History please?

I have just posted a new CC history article at www.chessmail.com, about the earliest CC matches in continental
Europe (not Britain).

I am keeping back my main discoveries on British CC for a future academic thesis and book,
but I will publish spin-off articles like this from time to time if people are interested.

And I have a question. In the book of the first American Chess Congress (ed D. W. Fiske) he says
that at least one of the first telegraph chess games played between Baltimore and Washington in
(I think early December) 1844 was published, but he did not publish the game himself. So maybe he
never saw it. I have looked in a few places without success.

Even a copy of the report in a paper that mentioned the match would be good to have.
There is a letter from Samuel Morse (cited in a biography of him) that says:
'the date of one of our games of chess is December 5, 1844' -
so presumably the report was next day or within a week or two of that date.

Unfortunately the most likely paper to have had it, the Baltimore Patriot, does not seem to be available for that
date. Any ideas, American readers?

Especially if there is any reader in the Baltimore/ Washington area who has access to local newspaper archives, I'd love to hear from you. Maybe Alan Savage, if you are reading this? Unfortunately when I was in the Baltimore area myself in April, it was only for 24 hours so I couldn't do anything about it, and I didn't have the exact date from Morse reference then.

[Tryfon Gavriel]

Hi Tim

I am sorry I can't help with your specific question. Could I ask you a question (and others interested) :

Is the following historical overview of correspondence chess history accurate or does it have any major errors:-

http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Lab/7378/postal.htm

BTW: Thanks for your correspondence games CD - it is excellent, and i recommend it to everyone now.

Best wishes
Tryfon

[Graham Clayton]

The Correspondence Chess League of Australia did not start until 1929, so there is a long time in Australia where "unofficial" CC games were played. As was the case in England, it was the newspapers who organised the games. Unlike Europe, where properly organised round-robin tournaments were run, the games in Australia were organised on a one-off "ad-hoc" basis. In the latter part of the 19th century, most major Australian newspapers had a chess column, where readers would submit answers for the problems in the column.
Eventually some readers would ask if the newspaper could arrange a game between themselves and other readers. The "Sydney Mail" organised quite a few of these games in the early 1880's. If I find the time to go to the State Library of NSW I will try and get a few game scores.

[Tim Harding]

In response to Tryfon's question last month (sorry I haven't looked at this board in a while), I took another look at the cited page
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Lab/7378/postal.htm

There seems to have been a recent attempt to update it and remove/ correct some of the mistakes of old.

Nevertheless i would warn all readers that the byline on that page is not a guarantee of quality, rather the reverse in my opinion.
Some of the items are genuine facts, others are just trivia and speculations which remain to be verified. For example, the Voltaire story; Egbert Meissenburg has been trying for years to see if that old rumour can be substantiated.

It is true that sometime in the 17th century Venetian merchants were playing correspondence chess against Croatian merchants. This was testified by Hyde but he did not give a precise date or date-span so the 165 given on the page is just a guess.

Mistakes remaining (of course they may be fixed after somebody reads this) include:

It is not true that "In 1824, the London Chess Club challenged the Edinburgh Chess Club". On the contrary, it is well documented that Edinburgh challenged London.
When my history of British CC is finished, a lot of misconceptions about this match will be cleared up.


There is a clear contradiction on the page between the statement that "The earliest surviving correspondence game in America is a game from the Washington DD Chess Club vs, the New York Chess Club, in 1839." and the one a few lines lower:
"The first correspondence games in the United States was between Norfolk, Virginia and New York in 1842." (Neither of these statements is accurate and the latter is not even a grammatical sentence!)

"In the 1850s some chess magazines promoted correspondence chess tournaments."

This sentence is almost verbatim plagiarism of a sentence in the CC article in the Oxford Companion to Chess (2nd ed p95) except that one of the words added in this version makes the statement untrue. I am pretty sure the person who compiled the web page has no idea which magazines promoted CC tournaments. Wait for my book!

There are numerous other errors, inaccuracies and verbal infelicities and I am not going to waste any more time debunking them.

Some of the statements on the page are correct; mostly ones borrowed from Ken Whyld or the ICCF website.
If you have the page bookmarked, I suggest you remove it from your favourites.

Tim