TWIC Syncing Tool

The Week in Chess is the famous website where all the news and important games from the prior week in chess are collected. It is located here: The Week in Chess

They describe themselves this way: The Week in Chess is a free weekly (Monday) publication in two parts, a text and a games section (either in ChessBase or PGN format) rounding up the most important chess of the previous week. A compilation of the games section of TWIC (in ChessBase format or conversion of this file to PGN) can be had for a donation of £30. There have been over 2.9 million games in TWIC since the first edition on 17th September 1994.

I find that work, family concerns and other things sometimes get in my way of getting to The Week in Chess. So we asked software developer Kevin Hurley if he would make a simple piece of software to help keep us up-to-date when we fall behind.

We are sharing this software TWIC-SYNC with you for FREE! Use TWIC-SYNC to easily sync PGNs from The Week in Chess to your computer.  Users can either sync all PGNs released on TWIC or only those released after a certain number (date.)

To Install and Run

-Download the Windows zip or MAC Zip from the GitHub page HERE.

-Create a folder for your downloaded TWIC files.  I use a folder under my ChessBase folder structure in Downloads and call it “TWIC.”.  You’ll need the path to the folder, so copy it.

-Extract the zip file to a folder of your choice (create a folder if you wish.) - The software does not “install.”  To run it, run the twic-sync executable “twic-sync.exe”  You can create a shortcut if you want one to pin to start or place on the desktop.

-TWIC-SYNC compares what you have previously downloaded with what is available and then downloads the difference. So when you start TWIC-Sync, you’ll need to enter the TWIC file path under “Local File Directory”

-If you enter a “TWIC number” (see the file list at the URL above) the TWIC SYNC won’t search for files below that.

-If TWIC Sync begins to slow down after repeated use, delete or move some of the older, unwanted TWIC PGNs. This decreases the number of files TWIC-SYNC needs to check to see what to sync.

THIS SOFTWARE IS FREE.

We encourage you to donate to Mark Crowther’s fine work at The Week in Chess. You may click the button on TWIC-SYNC to do so, or you may click the PayPal donate button (it takes credit cards) on the main page here: The Week in Chess.

If you wish to donate to Kevin Hurley for maintaining the software, he has set-up a Patreon on the start page of TWIC-SYNC.