Introduction

A very good day if you have found your way to this blog. Hello, I am Quah Seng Sun. I am known to some of my friends as SS Quah. A great part of my life is associated with the game of chess: first as a player, then an organiser and finally a chess journalist. As a chess writer, my column in The Star newspaper - sometimes weekly and sometimes fortnightly - spanned more than three decades from the 1980s (but not continuously) till the newspaper's management decided to stop it in March 2012. I reckon my output must number around a million words. 

This blog attempts to bring together all the chess columns.....well, maybe not all the columns since many were misplaced when I had relocated my home thrice. And with more words written than I can ever imagine condensed into an estimated 1,000-plus feature stories, if I can find them all, it will take a long time before I can ever complete digitising them. Some of the posts will be images only, whole pages scanned from the newspapers. Some others will be text only as I copy them over from various cloud depositories. I dare say that some may also be a combination of images and text, but let me see...

Hopefully as I go along, this blog will be filled with something to interest every chess-playing enthusiast. So, enjoy your past memories as we go way back into time. Definitely, I shall relive mine.

[NOTE 1: The chess columns have been arranged according to their original dates of appearance in the newspaper.]

[NOTE 2: As of 27 June 2021, I have managed to retrieve 588 of my chess columns in The Star newspaper. Have I passed the halfway mark? I really don't know. But what I do know is that I should still have undiscovered stuff in the store room.]

[NOTE 3: As of 29 June 2021, I had added a further 29 chess columns from The Star to this blog, making it 617 in total. Unfortunately, I seem to have misplaced all the newspapers from the 1980s until 1991, which is a great loss to me because I remember writing a memorable story on the Karpov-Timman FIDE Candidates final match in Kuala Lumpur. As at 04 July 2021, another two chess columns from The Star were found and added to this blog.]

[NOTE 4: As a small consolation, I have managed to locate and add 108 chess columns in text format to this blog as at 7 July 2021. I would have preferred to add the newspaper images but it is not possible. These text stories were the raw files that I emailed to The Star's Section 2/Star Two editors every week. As these were unedited, there are likely to be some differences from the version that finally appeared in print. Likewise, the preliminary headlines were mine and not the ones that appeared in print too. Total number of chess columns in The Star to date in this blog is 727.]

[NOTE 5: Odds and ends keep popping up. Managed to find four chess columns but I found that I had already put up the unedited text versions. Nevertheless, I've included the images of these pages into the posts. So today, 13 July 2021, I have 623 images of my chess columns from The Star newspaper onboard.]

[NOTE 6: As a bonus, I have uncovered some 17 stories I wrote for the National Echo in 1977 and 1978. At first. they were the occasional news stories about chess activities in Penang, written during my brief six-month stint in employment with this newspaper before I joined Ban Hin Lee Bank. Then in March 1978, I had persuaded the editor to give me space in the newspaper for an experimental chess column. This ran for a few weeks. Suffice to say, this short series of chess columns gave me the foundation to approach The Star later in 1984 for their own chess column.]