The Durban Chess Club Bulletin commenced publication in early 1973, and ran under the able editorship of Mervyn Millar until early 1983. A succession of editors then published the Bulletin from 1983 to 1988, when I took over as editor, and remained in that post until the end of 1996.

There are very few complete sets of Bulletins in existence, and in early 2006 I decided to compile a collection of all of the games that were published in the Durban Chess Club Bulletin. I was quite surprised to find that just over 1200 games had been published over the existence of the Bulletin. The games file has been zipped and is available here in ChessBase format:

Durban CC Bulletin (complete, 1219 games).

You will need to have ChessBase or Fritz on your computer. You can purchase these programs from the ChessBase home page. Their home page is updated daily when big tournaments are on, and their reports contain dozens of beautiful photos of the players and the venues.

When Mervyn Millar moved in early 2006, he came across a steel trunk of chess stuff in his garage. He very kindly gave these materials to myself, and they included the complete scoresheets for the Natal Opens of 1969, 1971 and 1972, as well as most of the scoresheets from the 1978 SA Open.

The detailed results from these events can be found on my Natal Champions page. Just click on the year for these and other Natal Open detailed results. I have compiled game databases from the scoresheets, and they are available here:

Natal Open Durban 1969 (complete, 133 games).
Natal Open Durban 1971 (complete, 112 games).
Natal Open Durban 1972 (complete, 233 games).

The files have been checked for accuracy against the official results. Where game scores were missing, or the game was decided by default, or a player had the bye, then I have included a game header and marked it as "official results" in the source.

The South African Open was first held in 1962 in Wilderness. The event returned there in 1964, before moving to Durban for the first time in 1966. It became customary for the SA Open to be held in even years, with the South African Closed being held in odd years. After being held in Durban again in 1974, Cape Town 1976 saw the event dominated by visiting GM's Najdorf and Stean. The same thing happened in Durban 1978, when we hosted IM's Pritchett and Sanguineti.

The following file contains all of the games played by the 64 players who scored 6 out of 11 or more (except for round 1 games, which were missing from the trunk). As usual, I have checked the file for accuracy against the official results, and have also entered the South African ratings:

RSA Open Durban 1978 (incomplete, 472 games).

The next SA Open in Durban was in 1984. No game scores are available for the 1984 event, other than those already published in the Club Bulletin. After meandering from Johannesburg in 1986 to Port Elizabeth in 1988 and back to Johannesburg in 1990, there was no event in 1992, this being held over until 1993, to celebrate the centenary year of the Durban Chess Club.

Visitors included IM's Pein, Van Mil, Welling and Sziva, but it was Cape Town's George Michelakis who won the event on tiebreak, and shortly thereafter became an IM himself. The vast majority of these games are published here for the first time (from the sources you will see that 69 games appeared in the Durban Chess Club Bulletin in 1993).

RSA Open Durban 1993 (complete, 919 games).

The Open returned to Durban in 1995, and again in 1996. Many years ago I published about 200 games from the 1995 and 1996 tournaments on the Internet, and these found their way into the files of ChessBase. Unfortunately, somebody mangled the player names with, for example, Gerald Boulle appearing as Gilles Boullier and Andrew Westermeyer as Arnulf Westermeier. If you find these names in your South African database, then you need to make some corrections! BTW, the file for 1996 only includes games for players who scored 6 out of 11 or more.

RSA Open Durban 1995 (complete, 797 games).
RSA Open Durban 1996 (incomplete, 509 games).