Chess Informant

Chess Informant is both the name of a Belgrade-based publishing company and its best-known periodical. Aleksandar Matanović and his associates founded the company in 1966 to distribute international chess information systematically in an era before online game databases.

The periodical collects important games, analysis, endgames, meaning late-game positions with relatively few pieces, combinations, meaning concrete move sequences built around threats, and opening novelties, which are new or little-explored ideas in the early phase. An annotated game does more than record the moves: it adds variations, or alternative move sequences, and evaluations of which side appears better. It also uses symbols to communicate many ideas with little dependence on language, which was especially useful when printed material circulated among readers in many countries.

Chess Informant is also closely connected with the Encyclopaedia of Chess Openings, because it developed the ECO classification, short for Encyclopaedia of Chess Openings, used to organize openings by code. Digital databases can now distribute games almost instantly, but Chess Informant remains historically important for understanding how elite games and knowledge about openings were collected, classified, and studied for decades.