Welcome Back to the “Gila” Roots: CaturGila is now GilaCatur!

If you’ve been reading the bylines or looking at the URL recently, you might have noticed a slight change. Moving forward, the blog is officially dropping the “CaturGila” moniker and rebranding to GilaCatur.

For the veterans of the Malaysian chess community, the “Gila” prefix probably sounds familiar.

Back in the early 2000s, I started gilachess.com. It was one of the pioneer platforms for local chess blogging, tournament news, and photography. Unfortunately, the original .com domain was lost in the early 2010s. I spent the following years trying to rebuild that momentum across different .net and .org domains, and navigating the headaches of free Blogspot sites randomly resetting and deleting content.

When I set up this current site, I initially went with “CaturGila” to avoid overlapping with other local chess blogs. But after a year of solid content here at our new, permanent home, it was time to come full circle.

Why GilaCatur? It is the most direct, accurate translation of the original “GilaChess” brand. It honors the history of the early days of Malaysian chess coverage while giving us a clean, permanent identity moving forward. Plus, it matches our URL perfectly: reading left to right, you are at gila.catur.org.

Thank you to everyone who has followed the journey from the early GilaChess days to now. Bookmark gila.catur.org, and I’ll see you at the next tournament!