The time to say good bye

 
Dear friends,
 
This is the final update of the chess-sector.odessa.ua website.
The resource was opened exactly five years ago - on the 4th August 1998. Since that time, the statistics of visits was growing up to the quite solid number of 445.000. I hope that many of those visitors managed to find the information needed, and didn't spend the time fruitlessly. Ukrainian chess always remained the main topic - possibly chess-sector.odessa.ua contributed to its coverage somewhat, having filled a nearly absolute informational vacuum which existed at the end of the 1990s. Lately Ukrainian chess has been starting to get a better coverage overall and on the web too, and this work has started to deserve a more professional approach. I hope that the internet-chronicle of chess in The Ukraine will be successfully continued by my colleagues at the sites of the chess newspaper Ladja (www.ladja.com.ua), and at the Chess Ukraine website (www.chesspage.kiev.ua). It is now also, probably, time for the Ukrainian chess federation to have a presence on the Internet. My own efforts in the near future are promised to be used in the leading Ukrainian sport newspaper Komanda (www.komanda.com.ua), where a chess page appears each Saturday, and also, returning to the Web, in Alexander Baburin's project Chess Today (www.chesstoday.net). Just today the CT subscribers received the jubilee issue 1000. A thousand days of non-stop chess news with daily annotated games - it is interesting to take part in such work! It is also sometimes interesting simply to play chess. These days an Open tournament with prizes and participating GMs is taking place in Odessa. The event, which everybody expected here for a long time...
In conclusion, I will not even try to mention everyone who helped the site during the period of its work. Many thanks to all regular and occasional contributors, once again.
Finally, a little bit more useful information: the Alushta tournaments organisers have informed me that they are preparing to launch their own website www.kaissa.com.ua.
 
Mikhail Golubev
Odessa, 4 August 2003