Personalia

At the start of our monthly congratulations we welcome Alain Biénabe, our French country representative from Bordeaux could surely taste a good drop [of whine] from his terroir at his 46th birthday on October, 3. Alain has been active as a problem composer for a long time and he has never committed himself to a particular direction, so in 1986 he could win the national championship title at the French solving championship. He has brought his expert knowledge extremely well into the book Le Guide des Échecs which he co-authored together with Nicolas Giffard and which we have already shortly acknowledged on our pages Publications of our Members. As Alain himself indicates in the a.m. book he also owns a considerable collection of chess books and magazines. As a country’s representative of our association he has always attended to his duties in an exemplary manner and furthermore he distinguished himself in translating the Yuletide No. 0 into English. Unfortunately I could discover only one - more than 20 years old - photo of Alain in the chess literature, he appears there in the midst of a group of French problemists during the meeting of the fairy chess friends at Andernach, 1983 [taken from Andernachrichten (by Peter Kniest, 1984), p. 56]:

Our next greetings go to the English county of Essex, in Southend-on-Sea Tony Peterson looked back on 45 years on October, 3 as well. He is known to us exclusively as a dealer of antiquarian and out-of-print chess books, you may inspect his current offers at his website.
Our member Jeffrey A. Tannenbaum from the US metropolis New York will be the next one on our birthday list, he completed his 57th year on October, 10. From the few details on him we only know that he is active as a collector, so we have to leave it at that short comment.
The same applies to chess friend and collector Sylvain Colsaet who has settled in the heart of France – namely in Orléans: he celebrated his 49th birthday 10 days later – on October, 20.

At the end of our - this time rather short - series we meet Frank Schubert from Dresden, he turned 38 on October, 29. After his studies of physics in Düsseldorf the born Rhinelander executed an "internal German castling" to Dresden, he also received there his doctor’s degree. Apart from astrophysics and cosmology he is particularly interested in computer chess – he is a constant contributor to the German magazine Computer-Schach & Spiele and he has published some articles there in the course of the last year: Lösung eines alten Problems – Ein neues Verfahren zur Auswertung von Stellungstests – Teil 1 (CSS 2/03) and Teil 2 (CSS 3/03); as well as Die Elo-Formel über Bord werfen? (CSS 5/03). We take also from CSS that Frank Schubert is very much involved in correspondence chess where he has spread his activities on several federations [BdF (= Deutscher Fernschachbund / Bund deutscher Fernschachfreunde); ICCF; DESC (= Deutscher E-Mail-Schachclub)].