A girl plays in an orphanage in India during confinement.EFE
There is a before and after in chess, a date that marks a little change: Gary Kasparovs defeat to IBMs Deep Blue in New York in 1997. The golden age of sports, in a few days when the media around the world dedicated thousands of hours and pages to cover the hercleo man-machine challenge, gave way to more periodically calm times. The coming world championships did not have the significance of the Fischer-Spassky, Karpov-Korchnoi or Kasparov-Karpov, either because of the charisma of these great masters or because any commercial program of less than 100 euros was able to overcome the number one without major problems.
But chess has survived evolving and adapting to the new times after almost a millennium and a half of setbacks thanks to the fact that as Ramn Rey Ardid, a psychiatrist and champion of Spain from 1929 to 1942, defined it is only one step above human intelligence A step enough to attract and not bore, be easy to learn, impossible to master. And in this fight to find his place in todays society and in the world of sports he found a new promised land and his second youth thanks to education and technology.
His introduction to teaching after the recommendations of the Senate in 1995 and of the European Parliament in 2012 contributed to making their practice universal, and there are already more than half a million children in Spain in learning courses (100,000 only in the official program of the Junta de Andaluca) when the number of federated according to the CSD in 2018 was 28,382. Something, saving the differences, similar to athletics that has 85,401 federated (2018) and yet hundreds of thousands of people practice it as an amateur. Curiously, in Spain there were more federated chess than athletics from 1941 to 1960
A game in New York these last few days.
Internet and chess are a perfect marriage. Gone are the times when fans go to a club, with semi-busy schedules in endless smoke evenings, and heatedly discuss this or that position. Now, at any time of the day, there are opponents of your level ready to play the electrical and adrenaline-charged games of 1 minute, the calmest of 25 or the classic of 90. There are also numerous teachers who teach in virtual classrooms, simultaneous sessions and tournaments that replicate competitions such as the Invitational Magnus Carlsen Chess24.com at another level, with comments in 7 languages, and number one in broadcasts of lite tournaments.
The Covid-19 pandemic has promoted the practice of chess as collected by portals such as Chess.com, which with almost 36 million registered users has reached projected figures for the 2021-2030 decade in the last quarter, with 8.5 million games disputed daily. Another website, Lichess.org stores more than 2,000 million games in its databases, of which 10% have been played in the last month. A realistic calculation indicates that annually, adding all the platforms, some 6,000 million. A dizzying figure, unimaginable, although not as much as the number of mathematically different games that could occur: 1 followed by 100,000 zeros!
The growth of chess practice has been exponential these daysdeclares Javier Ochoa from Echagen, President of the Spanish Federation. There has been a great demand for information and parents interested in these days of confinement, since the image we project is not only associated with entertainment, but also with education and culture.
Face-to-face and online chess is the same, but playing in three or two dimensions with the computer screen causes different sports situations. Pressing the clock when time troubles begin gives way to handling the mouse skillfully and quickly. Another example; In a live game there are no mistakes when leaving a piece in a space that is not the chosen one, while in those that are played in cyberspace it sometimes happens that the movement is not completed correctly., with the consequent consequences, sometimes catastrophic.
The question of possible pitfalls They need an in-depth analysis by the FIDE Refereeing Commission, not so much for the super lite competitions but for fans who may be tipped, just like a lecturer when reading with the telepronter. But these are setbacks of youth, of the second youth of chess.
Esports, on the Olympism radar for two years, have positioned themselves even more on the sports scene in this pandemic. In addition to conventional video games, spearheaded by the League of Legends, offline sports have adopted this formula to create their own competitions even beyond the well-known FIFA. Tennis, rugby, sailing they have turned to consoles as a competition formula to multiply audiences. Without going any further, the BRAND vertical has tripled the number of users and more than 15 million followed the Mutua Madrid Open.
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