Grandmaster Alexander Baburin, who now resides in Ireland, recently announced the launch of his two new Web projects. One Web site is called Grandmaster Square. The idea is to provide a place on the Web to those GMs who would like to have some presence on the Internet. The address is www.gmsquare.com and currently there are sites of three GMs there - Alexander Baburin himself, Alexander Morozevich and Lev Psakhis. In the near future Grandmaster Square plans to add Web sites of some other GMs and expand the existing pages. However, you can already see a few annotated games of those three Grandmasters in Java or download the games of Morozevich and Psakhis in a PGN format there. Grandmasters' biographies, a photo gallery and a discussion forum are just some of the features of the site. Hopefully it will help chess fans to establish a contact with some of their favourite players. A chess shop and auction site will shortly be added to www.gmsquare.com . At the moment GM Baburin posts his daily report on 34^th Chess Olympiad from Istanbul at the site.

His other project is a chess newspaper called Chess Today - www.chesstoday.net.

It will provide daily news, interviews and instruction to a wide range of players. Each issue will feature one annotated game and news from around the world, while weekend issues will have some instructional materials, particularly useful for club players. A typical issue will have between 2 and 3 pages. Subscribers will receive an attachment in PDF format, which they can print out and then read Chess Today on a train or over a cup of coffee. Thanks to PDF format (Acrobat Reader is available for free) readers will be able to see and print chess fonts and diagrams even if they do not have them on their PCs.

Producing a daily chess newspaper is a rather bold idea, which requires a lot of work. GM Baburin does not do it alone - IM Vladimir Barsky, GM Ruslan Scherbakov and Graham Brown (technical editor) are other people behind this project.

The subscription is not free - Chess Today costs about $15 for 4 months, which is only about 12 cents per issue or 4-6 cents per page. As this newspaper can save you a lot of time searching chess sites every day and can also help you to learn more about chess, this may be a good deal. Those who subscribe before 25^th of December 2000, will enter a lottery with a chance to win a wooden chess set & board (worth over $130), a chess clock (worth about $70) or a good chess book (choice of 3 titles). More information and a sample issue are available at www.chesstoday.net.