Hi all,

I've just joined this select group and thought I'd introduce myself. I just make it into the Old Fart age limit, but perhaps more significantly I've just returned to the game after an absence of just over 30 years, so my recollections of "then" as opposed to "now" are quite distinct.

The two biggest difference I've noticed since returning are:

1) the influence of computers and the Internet

2) no-one smokes any more! (This may be a UK thing, since smoking in indoor public areas was banned a couple of years back. I've never smoked, but I well remember the board disappearing before my eyes in a cloud of my opponent's cigarrette- or pipe-smoke.)

Other things I recall:

- Not just adjournments, but adjudications. Most of our evening matches got to the first 30-move time-limit and then went off to some guru to adjudicate the result if we couldn't decide (no wonder I'm useless at endgames!)

- English chess before we had any GMs. I met (although never played) our first GM Tony Miles when he was at university

- buying hundreds of envelopes for postal chess and then realising I could use postcards!

- when the "opening book" was really a book, as opposed to the almost infinite learning resource that the Internet now provides

On this last point, I have a "does anyone remember?" question. In the 70s I borrowed a book which was the manual equivalent of today's opening databases (like game explorer on this site). Some amateur enthusiast in the US - I can't remember his name - had dedicated years of his life to analysing hundred of thousands of master games and identifying the win/draw/loss ratio. All done by hand without any computer assistance, and all set out in a book! Does anyone recall the book or its author?

(One further clue: The book's introduction started with the memorable phrase "[Author] did not look like a man who had just taken on the entire Russian government!" - referring to the 'soviet chess machine' of that era.)

OK, hope that works as an intro. I've also got a little story that I'll post next time.

PS: In the photo, I'm the one without the hat!