WELCOME TO MY WEBSITE
This website is devoted to the history of the Durban Chess Club and to the stories of chess players who lived and breathed chess in Durban and its surrounding areas. Durban Chess Club was founded in 1893, making it one of the oldest chess clubs in South Africa. I joined the club in 1974 and was privileged to win the club championships a record 25 times, before retiring from active play at the end of 2018.

Coverage of current events at DCC will be limited as I am no longer active at the club. In the news archive you will find all the reports that I wrote about the club from 2004 to 2019. I have also written extensively about chess in KZN from 2014 to 2018, and you will find these reports on my blog.

IMPORTANT NOTICE
All Durban Chess Club activities were suspended in March 2020 because of the coronavirus pandemic. For more information visit the Department of Health website. The chairman and his committee all decided to quit in 2020 and the club has not yet been able to reopen.

EARLY NEWSPAPER RESEARCH
The National Library of Australia has scanned a large number of old newspapers, which can be found at the Trove website. They ran OCR on the images to make the website searchable. The index is not perfect, but I was still able to find lots of news from the early days of the Durban Chess Club. Apparently the Australians liked to reprint chess items from Border's column in the Natal Mercury, which included problems and news from the Durban Chess Club! I have transcribed some of these game scores for my pages on Durban champions. Researching online like this is much easier than trying to read the battered microfilm at the Durban Reference Library.

INTERVIEW ON TWITCH TV
I was interviewed in 2020 by Lyndon Bouah on the Calvin Klaasen chess channel. Calvin and Lyndon have been producing the "Reflections" series of interviews on Tuesday nights from early September and they are well worth watching, with a wide range of South African chess personalities as guests. Go to the Calvin Klassen Chess channel on Twitch TV to see the interview with myself. You can skip the first 5 minutes where we were checking that everything was working. I went through 3 of my games in the middle of the show, and here is a link to the games discussed on the show. The show lasted just over an hour.

DURBAN ONLINE CHESS (DOC)
In the early days of the pandemic, with over-the-board chess no longer being played, chess players all over the world switched to online chess instead. Riccardo Benedetti formed a group for Durbanites to engage each other in online chess activities, which I believe is now administered by Devon Govender and Henry Oliver. Those interested should first join lichess then apply to join the "Durban Online Chess" team. Detailed results and games from online DOC events can be found at the DOC events page.

NASHLEN STARS FOR OXFORD
Former DCC champion Nashlen Govindasamy was studying at Oxford University in 2020 and took part in the annual Oxford vs Cambridge match, held on 7th March 2020. Here is a link to an article by John Saunders about the match. I was interested to see that Nashlen played on board 6 and was awarded the best game prize (a painting) for his effort. Here is the score of Nashlen's game: