Last week’s poll question was “How many books in the Yusupov series have you completed?” The result is clear: ‘zero’ was top followed by ‘1-3’ with the rest lagging a long way behind. Sure, a number of those who voted ‘zero’ will not own any of the books, but there are certainly many who have bought the books but not gotten around to working through them yet. So the Yusupov Challenge is much needed.
This week’s poll question is: “Did you follow the Women’s World Championship to some degree?” This is a follow-up question to last month’s “Will you be following the Women’s World Championship live?” when the main answer was ‘no’. But maybe a few of the dramatic incidents caught your attention and encouraged you to follow the action? Or maybe you prefer to check out the games after they are finished, rather than follow it live. There are so many ways to follow a chess event these days, it is almost impossible to make a good guess about the size of the audience.
I followed as much of the Women’s World Championship live as I was able, a benefit of being ‘in between jobs’ at the moment 🙂 I enjoyed the coverage and the commentary, which was excellent for a player of my standard, understandable and instructive. Many of the games were exciting and I found the while thing very worthwhile. Certainly compared with the boring non event that was the FIDE Grand Prix it was a good advert for the game of chess.
Obviously the Women’s World Championship also attracted media attention for some other ‘wrong’ reasons, format, location, attire, missing players. But all in all I thoroughly enjoyed being a spectator. It is a shame that, despite relaying the moves live, neither Chessbase nor Chess24 really gave the event equal status to a Men’s event by showing a Game of the Day video for example.