Believing the impossible
Wonderland background: magical room with chessboard floor and many keyhole doors (Shutterstock)
Much of my professional career in chess has been involved with organising world chess championships in London: namely, those of 1986, between Garry Kasparov and Anatoly Karpov, 1993, which saw Britain’s Nigel Short fail in his challenge to Kasparov, and 2000, when Vladimir Kramnik finally terminated Kasparov’s 15-year reign as champion. As a corollary, hoc opus hic labor est, I fought to get chess covered on television, convinced that if snooker could make it, so could chess.
I would never have believed it possible that the current and increasing statistics for viewing chess via online TV could have become so staggeringly successful. One advantage chess has over snooker is that viewers can actually play online, as well as watch. An up to the minute press release from Chess.com indicates the dramatic extent of this media triumph for our game.
“Chess.com has announced a ground-breaking new partnership with Wurl, the leader in data-driven solutions for CTV, to deliver its Chess TV FAST channel to new streaming platforms.
For the first time, elite events such as the Champions Chess Tour, Chess.com Global Chess Championship, the Speed Chess Championship and the World Chess Championship will be aired across the Chess TV FAST footprint. In addition to the live broadcasts, Chess TV will include original chess programmes such as Street Chess, which examines the chess scene in select cities, and existing series featuring legendary players such as Magnus Carlsen, Hikaru Nakamura, Fabiano Caruana and Anish Giri.Chess.com CEO, Erik Allebest said: The Chess.com community is growing every single day. Chess has gone mainstream and its interest on a global scale is at an all-time high. We have a powerful chess platform that will help drive Chess TV into the FAST space and we’re looking forward to working with Wurl to make that happen. Through Wurl’s Global FAST Pass solution, Chess TV will be marketed to streamers worldwide. Global FAST Pass is the world’s largest Free Ad-supported Streaming TV (FAST) channel network, reaching more than 300 million viewers in 195 countries across 38 streamer brands.”
In May 2023, Chess.com membership soared past 140 million worldwide, which represents a 355% increase since January 2020, with 150,000 new users being registered each day. The site also had more than 57 million monthly active users playing 840 million games during the month, up 550% since January 2020. Chess.com is the 114th world ranked site on the internet, while in June 2023, Chess.com was named one of TIME’s 100 Most Influential Companies.
I must admit to never having heard of FAST or Wurl, before I received this gushing press release. Living, as I do, as a dinosaur remnant from the Cretaceous period in my ivory cave, resorting to wielding my goose quill pen, occasionally dipped in venom (with apologies to Waldo Lydecker from the film Laura), I can hardly expect to be au courant with the latest communications technology. Now I know better.
While on the topic of impossible things: to adapt George Orwell’s notorious lines parodying socialism, all animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others, of my impossible list, some things are more impossible than others.
Alice laughed: “There’s no use trying ; one can’t believe impossible things.”
“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
This is from Lewis Carroll’s chess-based fantasy Alice through the Looking Glass. I have gone into Stakhanovite overdrive and doubled the regulation six impossible things, as prescribed by the Red Queen, to be believed before breakfast.
Here is my list of twelve impossible things in which I have succeeded in believing.
- Boris Johnson will return as PM.
- All official sporting bodies will restrict entry to females born as such.
- Effective action will be taken against disruption by Greenpeace, Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion.
- The Government will stop illegal immigration.
- The fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square will be occupied by a statue of our late Queen.
- Proper redress will be given to the victims of the Post Office scandal and those responsible will be punished.
- Remoaners will gracefully accept that the UK has definitively left the EU.
- Inheritance tax will be abolished.
- More severe penalties will be introduced against terrorists, child murderers and those who kill police officers.
- The UK government will cease giving foreign aid to nuclear powers.
- Russia will lose in Ukraine and withdraw from its occupied territories, including Crimea.
- Unrealistic net zero targets will be abolished and climate change scams exposed.
And as a bonus to my golden dozen, the leadership of the Church of England will be converted to Christianity and start to believe in God.
A new book deserves serious attention: Re engineering the Classics is written by the dream team of Grandmaster Matthew Sadler and Steve Giddins. It’s impossible to believe that a better team exists to undertake the particular task of subjecting a selection of celebrated games to rigorous computer analysis. The results are shocking, with time hallowed moves, previously showered with accolades, being revealed as mistakes when subjected to the ruthlessly dispassionate scrutiny of the merciless engines.
This week I give a sensational example. Traditionally, Euwe’s …Rh8 sacrifice against Geller has been showered with exclamation marks. In fact it’s a blunder which should have converted a win into a draw. In this week’s game selection I also include a few modest proposals to consider for selection in any sequel to which the illustrious authors might consider turning their own quill pens.
Keene vs. Kovacevic Reshevsky vs. Bronstein
Raymond Keene’s latest book “Fifty Shades of Ray: Chess in the year of the Coronavirus”, containing some of his best pieces from TheArticle, is now available from Blackwell’s . His 206th book, Chess in the Year of the King, with a foreword by The Article contributor Patrick Heren, and written in collaboration with former Reuters chess correspondent, Adam Black, is in preparation. It will be published later this year.
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