The “What do you think about chessboxing?” poll ended sooner than planned due to server issues, but it lasted long enough to give a clear verdict. ‘Piece of nonsense’ won by a knockout. A reminder of the ‘Who will win the 2017 US Championship?’ poll result, as Wesley So will face Alexander Onischuk in a […]
One of the minor irritations of being a chess fan is that when chess is mentioned in the mainstream media, it is usually because a chess player did something odd, not something brilliant. Recent mainstream chess stories include a player losing on purpose to protest pairings, and Kirsan resigning/not resigning, though at least that is
Last week’s poll question was ‘Who will win the 2017 US Championship?’ As expected, the Big Three collected almost all the votes. Wesley So was top, getting over half the vote, with Caruana on 30% and Nakamura on a surprisingly low 10%. The games start a couple of days from now, so we shall see.
Grandmaster Preparation on Forward Chess (and the poll result) Read Post »
Last week’s poll asked ‘Has your rating gone up or down since a year ago?’ The ‘almost unchanged’ answer was unsurprisingly most common, but when you add up the other answers you see 87 gained significantly, while 79 went down significantly. And the big gainers (up over 80 points) are an impressive 10% of the
2017 American Champion? Read Post »
Last week’s poll question was ‘Did you follow the Women’s World Championship to some degree?’ There was a decent range of responses, but I think it fair to say the event did not have huge numbers of avid spectators. If you take the votes for ‘didn’t follow it at all’ and ‘I vaguely know who
How’s your Rating? Read Post »
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
Did you follow the Women’s World Championship? Read Post »
Last week’s poll question was “How many books in the Yusupov series do you own?” Top answer was ‘zero’ but next was ’10’. I find that hugely encouraging. My interpretation is that if you read one Yusupov book, you may be impressed enough to want to get all of them. Continuing the current Yusupov theme
How many books in the Yusupov series have you read? Read Post »
Last week’s poll question was: ‘Where are you?’ I offered so many options that an image big enough to make all the results readable would break the internet, so below are just the edited highlights. Rest of Europe (196 votes, 40%) North America (72 votes, 14%) British Isles (61 votes, 12%) Rest of Asia (57
The Yusupov series Read Post »