Isolation from the coronavirus pandemic multiplied the games, generated tournaments among the best in the world, and allowed fans to face the cracks. Statistics and testimonies about this unprecedented boom in history.
Hernán Sartori
07/14/2020 - 6:31
- Clarín.com
- sports
Sunday, May 3, 2020. Prepared mate, tea or coffee. The Ajedrecear tournament starts at 16 and for an hour and a half 2,476 professionals and amateurs battle. The scene is repeated nine weeks later, at the XX Rio Grande International Open, with 1,047 entries from 39 countries as diverse as Angola, Bangladesh, Armenia, India, Latvia, Norway, the Philippines and Venezuela. Chess lovers have the pleasure of playing fast games with great masters they would never have dreamed of facing, like Alexei Shirov , former number two in the ranking. The best in the world are not left out, with Magnus Carlsen at the head of a circuit created by the number one of this era with a bag of $ 1 million and games transmitted with the soccer story of Pepe Cuenca. They are three scenes of an unpublished phenomenon. It is the true revolution of online chess , the only sport that grew and never stopped playing during the quarantine.
The coronavirus pandemic and compulsory isolation fueled the need for entertainment and to be mentally active. In this troubled river, chess came out winning because of scandal , because its ease of playing the Internet without leaving home activated those who had latent memories of learning this ancient game, as artistic as it was scientific, and allowed the multiplication of online games , generated historical championships among the top grandmasters, favored fans to face cracks , empowered distance classes and built a new scenario for the future: how to deal with cheats and how to turn the sport into a streaming show , profitable with sponsors .
In this special report, the online chess boom during the four months of world confinement is reconstructed and described , which goes far beyond the sport vs. dichotomy. play and opens the debate on its therapeutic benefits to relax quarantined tension and educational to instill values such as patience, first impulse control, planning, strategy and decision-making under pressure. A pressure that intensifies with fast-paced or lightning games, which are the majority of those played over the Internet, where you don't think about spending 4 hours in front of a monitor. This combo that takes effect in a present backed by amazing statistics collected by Clarín from the three most important online chess platforms and by testimonies that support the historical nature of this present.
"Chess is the only sport that can be practiced on the Internet, apart from bridge, if we take as a reference the list of sports recognized by the International Olympic Committee, and that is being made the most of, paradoxically thanks to a terrible pandemic, of the which chess is really benefiting a lot ”, describes the Spanish Leontxo García , the most prestigious popularizer of the“ game-science ”in Spanish, followed with devotion for decades with his columns in the newspaper“ El País ”.
"It is no coincidence what happens with chess, because it is one of the activities that is best adapted to go from live to online . It is a tool that today grows second by second. Many new people today find a way out on days when they are locked up and do not know how to entertain themselves. It is a discipline that becomes a good way to keep the mind agile ”, says the great teacher Diego Flores, seven-time Argentine champion, one of the record of the legendary Miguel Najdorf.
Claudia Amura , the first great Argentine female teacher, finds several arguments for such a boom . "In times of pandemic, chess exploded worldwide because it really is one of the few sports that can be practiced online and for free," he summarizes. At any time you can play on platforms against people from everywhere and in any language. It's universal".
Carolina Luján, the absolute international teacher and number one in the country, agrees between surprise and satisfaction at this paradoxical present. "It is something very particular, but in this tragic context worldwide, chess was enhanced with thousands of people of all ages playing tournaments," she says. It is really very striking that we are the only sport that has never stopped having activity ”.
While for the great teacher Alan Pichot, former world champion Sub 16 and who became number 1 in Argentina shortly before the world quarantine, "people highly appreciate the online chess boom and can play and see live the best in the world , who face each other online because they can't sit face to face playing a game in a tournament. ”
Now, why is there talk of "revolution", " boom " or "boom" of online chess ? Clarín contacted the three main platformsand their statistics are particularly overwhelming even to themselves. They are facing a colossal scenario , to which they have quickly adjusted and hope that it will not decline, although nothing will be equal to the explosion they saw since March, when the world began to understand that the coronavirus had to be taken seriously, that it had to keep at home and -why not- cut off the tension by playing a game .
American Nick Barton is Director of Business Development for Chess.com, the most important chess platform, launched in May 2007, which held the first online Nations Cup in May with the International Federation (FIDE) , with 6 teams of 6 members from China (winner), United States, Europe, Russia, India and Rest of the World. Before consulting this newspaper, its diagnosis and its numbers are very clear to exemplify the phenomenon.
" This moment can be summed up in a single conclusion: between March and June, we experienced the growth we expected for the next five years," he confesses. Players, games, solved problems, completed lessons and watched videos grow. Our team works to ensure that everyone in the world, including Argentina, has a place to find passion for chess and have fun while we go through this pandemic together. ”
Go if they have succeeded. On Chess.com they went from 247 to 243 million games played during January and February to a constant increase: 293 million in March, 331 million in April, 350 million in May and 368 million in June. Yes, an average of 12,200,000 per day. Record after record. Compared to the 6 million daily played between March 16 and April 15, 2019 and the same period this year, games grew 83 percent.
From Denmark Sebastian Kuhnert , CEO of Chess24.com, offered a similar growth picture. " The games have doubled , registrations on the platform grew 200 percent, between March 2019 and March 2020 we had 80 percent more users and Chessable.com, the group's educational chess platform, grew more than 100 % in that period ”, he writes from Europe. And he summarizes the moment and the company's objective: " People love to play chess and we are doing our best to promote the popularity of the sport while we are in quarantine."
Lichess.org is an absolutely free platform, does not allow advertising and is supported by donations since 2010. Basically, it detonated with the pandemic. “ Since the world was quarantined, Lichess users have exploited. Our daily peak went from an average of 48,000 users to 90,000, an 87.5 percent increase. We had to order new servers and put them into operation to supply so much load - Chris Callahan confesses in the exchange with Clarín -. We couldn't expect this when we had 30,000 users if we now triple the number. The 'problem', to call it somehow, is that they grew by a thousand a day. Now everything has stabilized. ”
The numbers speak for themselves. According to the official database, Lichess went from 31 million games in February 2019 to 44 million a year later, 55 million in March, 73 million in April and a record 75 million in May . "Chess seems to be the perfect activity for those who are locked up," sums up Chris. As if it were necessary at this point.
Chess fans who were dormant or didn't have time to sit down in a club, in a plaza or with another friend to play face-to-face suddenly found themselves with an opportunity to be active and jump into action in front of a monitor, a tablet or a cell phone. To play it has been said ...
FIDE took note and, together with the three online platforms, organized the Checkmate Coronavirus festival (Checkmate at the coronavirus). What did this unpublished initiative consist of? Between May 18 and June 16, there were 720 uninterrupted hours of chess, with 2,762 free tournaments, in which there were 517,661 participants. The top prize was winning one of 64 invitations to live a week close to the Moscow Olympiad, postponed to 2021 by the pandemic. Yes, 64, like the squares on the board. Marketing, they tell him. This is how fans were once able to face some of the 1,726 graduates they played, including 309 grandmasters from 114 countries. The United Nations of chess.
“On a board, two kingdoms face off in a battle that only one side can win. In real life, chess is a game that unites us, makes us feel part of a family, a community, a planet. Be safe and play chess, ”was the message from Russian Arkady Dvorkovich when launching the initiative. Someone knows about political doll who was the right hand of Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev between 2012 and 2018.
Garry Kasparov vs. Veselin Topalov
Garry Kasparov (white) - Veselin Topalov (black) - 1999
Garry Kasparov (white)
Veselin Topalov (black)
1999
But another vein was also opened: seeing the best grandmasters on the planet live, away from face-to-face from the embarrassing Tournament of Candidates, suspended halfway in late March, when it became untenable for them to continue playing in Yekaterinburg of a Russia in full pandemic. Of course, fans don't exactly take a passive role, because platforms allow them to follow notable games with live analysis. They look at the top, learn from other top who comment and have fun in the process.
What does chess have to do with fun? Everything. At least that is what the viewer feels when he follows the live broadcasts from Chess24.com in Spanish, with the soccer stories, as oppressive as they are enriching, of the great teacher Pepe Cuenca, who is so passionate about the games that remain in bed after the tension , witty phrases and screams. Yes, screams and jokes everywhere.
“Beyond what is always said about how it forms intelligence and helps solve problems, we believe in chess as a great product and entertainment. You have a lot of fun playing or following it and it makes you feel very excited. That is what people need. Some see it as more serious or elitist, but it is far from that. With our broadcasts, we want chess, beyond being able to help you make decisions, to be something that entertains you and makes you spend these days of confinement better ”, explains the international master David Martínez -“ El Divis ”, in the online world -, director of Chess24 in Spanish, commentator of games and alter ego of the so-called Cuenca.
Mikhail Tal vs. Aleksander Koblents
Mikhail Tal (white) - Aleksander Koblents (black) - 1961
Like Magnus Carlsen, the king of this era, was associated with the PlayMagnus project to Chess24, on this platform the online tournament circuit created by the Norwegian is broadcast live , with a purse of 1 million dollars . "The Magnus Carlsen Invitational had a record 114,000 views in the final and we estimate that the event was followed by 10 million people, including on TV, " says Kuhnert. "On the You Tube Spanish channel, we went from having 1,100,000 views in January to a record 2 million in April and May, " adds Martinez, happy to meet a goal that started from a question. "At the peak of the crisis, we said to ourselves: 'Why don't we try to entertain chess for free at this critical moment?' We realized that at home people would be happy to be accompanied, "she acknowledges. And so it has been more than three months with transmissions of eight hours a day. A machine.
The cancellation of the face-to-face tournaments was a blow to the professionals, who stopped competing in their countries, traveling to fight in more competitive markets and receiving awards in case of good performances. So they also found a streak as online commentators . “ Our life as a professional chess player was cut short, without the chance to travel and compete. So the alternative is this, ”says Flores, who is carrying out the Latin Chess project together with the international master Jorge Rosito and the Uruguayan grandmaster Andrés Rodríguez, with whom he is streaming the tournaments of the Argentine Federation on Chess.com.
Grandmaster Alan Pichot, former U16 world champion and number one in Argentina, hopes to play face to face again.Photo: Maxi Failla
“I haven't seen a real chess board for almost 4 months, with the pieces in my hands. But I still enjoy this boom and hope it stays post-pandemic, ”wishes Pichot, a commentator on Chess 24 in Spanish, where María Florencia Fernández, Ayelén Martínez and Luján are also seen. "With so many days without going out and with limited activities, chess is a way of training and entertaining in a very healthy way," argues the country's number one. Turning to chess is a good option and many people who are not from our small world are doing it. What's more, some friends ask me for advice, when they didn't give me a ball all my life. I've been playing chess for 25 years and they never showed the interest they show now, heh. ”
From San Luis, Amura complements: “Everyone who said to you: 'How boring!' or 'I don't have time' , now he found the desire and he managed to occupy his time with chess ”. And his final reflection is as witty as it is sincere in this online world that grew: “ The curiosity is that many learned to play chess with devices and will not know what to do when they face a normal game. For example, how the pieces are located on the board or how to act when they want to castle, because they will not have a computer that will move the tower after the king has moved, hehe. We invite them to learn to have fun live when it is finally time to shake hands before and after a game. ”
Checkmate.
A tradition that was strengthened in Argentina
Shocking. The chess tables of the South American Youth Festival, arranged at the CeNARD Sports Center León Najnudel, at the end of last year.Photo: Courtesy Eugenia Alegre
Argentina has a historical sports and cultural relationship with chess. Buenos Aires hosted the world title match between José Raúl Capablanca and Alexander Alekhine in 1927, the Olympics in 1939 and 1978, and the final of the 1971 Candidate Tournament between Bobby Fischer and Tigran Petrosian . Potrero de los Funes saw Veselin Topalov's consecration as world champion in 2005. The golden generation of Miguel Najdorf, Julio Bolbochán , Héctor Rossetto and Oscar Panno , among others, won 3 Olympic silver and 2 bronze medals between 1950 and 1962. And the science-game was disseminated by neighborhood and specialized clubs. So it is not surprising that the boom in online chess is also evident in this country.
" We see impressive growth from Argentina. The number of new users per week from Argentina jumped 255% from January and until the end of March more than 1,000 Argentines per day were added to Chess.com ”, graphs Nick Barton from the United States. "In Argentina we had 64% more users in March compared to the same month of 2019", adds Sebastian Kuhnert, from Chess24.com, in the same tune.
The seven-time national champion Diego Flores, competitor and teacher of masters in the science-game, follows the phenomenon to pure amazement. "People don't stop playing tournaments. Chess clubs are overcrowded and many sites have saturation problems. There is a kind of boom , of massification, as it probably has never been , because there are really many people who come to the world of virtual chess, "he details.
Donald Byrne vs. Bobby fischer
Donald Byrne (white) vs. Bobby Fischer (black) - 1956
Even the Argentine Federation itself was overcome by the situation. “The 85 federations in the country hold important tournaments and many people join without being federated. It is a world that has exploited us and we are trying to channel it because there is enormous activity. We are pleasantly surprised and already have 3,000 registered for the FADA online club at Chess.com. The pandemic has forced us to dedicate ourselves to these tournaments, because they are going to remain ”, assures the president of the entity, Mario Petrucci . The setting is so vast that online Argentine championships of the different categories were launched , in the blitz (3 minutes per player, plus 2 seconds per move) and fast (10 plus 2) rhythms .
“ The love for chess in Argentina occurs because the work of historical clubs was and is behind it and because there was acceptance at the school level. What allowed the important development of the software is that the mass of people who play it in person can now play it online, "explains the international master Enrique Scarella , coordinator of the Municipal Chess School of San Martín , to Clarín and leader of the Villa Ballester Chess Circle.
In this traditional entity, since April 1 they have organized 30 open tournaments on Lichess.org, every Wednesday and Saturday, with 3,660 participants . The peak occurred on April 25, with 225 players. On Tuesdays and Thursdays you can attend simultaneous classes and on Fridays there are tournaments for school-age youth.
The Ushuaia Chess Circle and the Municipal Sports Institute of that city carry 106 consecutive tournaments on the same platform, every day at 3:00 pm , and they already had 13,614 participants . The star of the move was the 17-hour continuous chess festival that was held to celebrate the longest night (June 20-21) with two tournaments: one from 5 to midnight and one from 0 to 10, in which Paraguayan grandmaster Axel Bachmann won after playing 108 lightning games over ten hours. Between the two championships, there were 2,160 participants from 33 countries, who played 21,374 games.
The Argentine women's team, in full at the 2018 Batumi Chess Olympiad: Marisa Zuriel, Ayelén Martínez, María Florencia Fernández, Carolina Luján and Claudia Amura (forward). Photo: @DamasOlimpicas
San Luis is a world model of the educational implementation of this game-sport. After the 2005 World Cup, the province created the chess program of the Universidad de la Punta. And everything went off exponentially. “Many children were interested, we started with 5,000 and we are already going for the 65,000 young people and adolescents in social chess spaces. And our Talent School is the hotbed in a province where free Wi-Fi was promoted as a human right more than a decade ago . Today, first-grade tablets and fourth-grade computers are delivered , so classes and tournaments are easier, "the great teacher Claudia Amura, in charge of the program, explains to this newspaper.
The impact of the isolation from the strict quarantine imposed on March 20 by the National Government is clearly evident in the data provided by Amura. "From January 1 to March 20, 3,021 people participated in our marathons (on Lichess.org). From March 21 to Sunday, July 12, there were 21,156 - it is amazing to say - about 4,000 boys played online in school tournaments for two months and among the other daily activities from March to date we have exceeded 40 thousand users ".
Villa Ballester, Ushuaia and San Luis are three examples that multiply in every corner of Argentina, a country that breathes chess , while waiting to play face to face again.
How to play online?
Playing chess online is as simple as entering some of the platforms and creating a user with a password. Everything for free. Once this first step is done, all you have to do is click on the "play" option and you're done: you choose the rhythm of the game and an opponent from anywhere in the world will soon appear.
If you want to participate in tournaments of different rhythms, on each platform there is that option in two modalities: sand and Swiss. In the first there is a set time, during which the participants play each other relentlessly. The more wins you chain, the more points will be added. There is always a bonus when more than two straight wins are achieved. And at the end of time, there will be a podium. Meanwhile, the Swiss system has a limit of rounds, after which the podium is known.
Trap control
The Magnus Carlsen Invitational tournament brought together eight of the world's greatest grandmasters online.
Done the law done the snare. The saying also applies to online chess , because it may be the case - and there are - that some tournament participants play with the help of analysis modules with which all professionals train. That is, they make the best plays suggested by the programs. What's the point of this? None, except swindling your own mind. But as sporadic cases happen, national federations and tournament organizers have very clear " anticheating " regulations .
If they find suspicious results from unknown players or some good ones against much higher level rivals, they analyze their games with the software and the "helper" jumps right away. How a teacher discovers plagiarism in a student or how a journalist immediately identifies when in another medium they have "borrowed" part of a note from him. In all cases, in addition to a lack of respect, ethics is at stake .
It is unthinkable that the great masters cheat. Still, at every elite online tournament they are asked to turn on a camera to focus on them and even pan to see what they have in the room where they play. Taking care of yourself is loving yourself. Prestige would disappear if the help of an analysis module were discovered. That is why it is a resource for amateur players to give it to those who are wise.
“At this point it is good to make the triple point that not a single elite player has even been considered a suspect in cheating : neither in Internet games nor in person. Being caught cheating would be such a horrible discredit that it dissuades him. That's why cheating happens between fans, ”explains Leontxo García, who is clear on how to deal with this temptation. "The solution has to go through two ways," he warns: "the computer systems for detection of traps in which companies work must be further sophisticated, and harsh penalties must be imposed on anyone found guilty red-handed ." The first time, five years. The second, in perpetuity. "
Leandro Plotinsky , referee and international organizer, offers his gaze and explains how to act in Argentina. "In a massive tournament, it is very difficult to control if the players cheat, beyond that the anticheating team of FADA, Chess.com and Latin Chess is very good and has eliminated players," he says. Those punished have the right to a defense and the Ethics Committee defines suspensions that can be up to 6 months ”. In order not to go to that extreme and deter, in each Argentine Online Championship that is being played, cameras have been asked to see the players in the key instances. And from the semifinals, renowned masters follow the games live so that everything is as neat as possible.
A future with two key questions
Leontxo García is the Spanish journalist and popularizer of the number one Spanish-speaking chess.Photo: Diego Díaz
This revolution of online chess with a frenetic rhythm generates an evident reflection: the future of this game or sport lies in fast games, which attract fans because of their vertigo and even those who do not understand too much, seeing the reactions of teachers? Leontxo García thinks of these determining factors as the key to the development of chess as a product that can be transmitted as a show .
“The future of chess is clearly moving towards fast modalities. Not the fastest, three minutes per player, but those in which a game can last between half an hour and an hour, "says the Spaniard. Afterwards, it is well worth reviewing his arguments: “The explanation is twofold: first, trying to promote in the 21st century a sport whose games can last 4 or 5 hours at a thought rate is not easy; furthermore, in chess beauty is almost always the daughter of error ”.
And he adds in this regard: “If two machines face each other whose level of play is perfection, it is unlikely that they will produce beauty from the judgment of an average fan. On the other hand, between two humans who also play fast, the error is more frequent. And if I'm wrong, my rival will find a beautiful combination to punish my mistake. While in slow games, the quality is so great that for the average fan they end up being boring. Slow games only have a future from a scientific point of view, but not from the point of view of popular sport. ”
When it comes to wondering how to take advantage of this phenomenon in the midst of a pandemic, the other unknown remains mature: if it is a portable game with so many facets to apply in everyday life, why wait to incorporate it into the school curriculum no longer? optional but definitely?
"The spread of the game is so wide that we hope that when the pandemic passes, this broad level of participation and activities can be maintained. The programmatic teaching of chess in schools should be made official , the neighborhood clubs that are fundamental pillars should be strengthened, and online activities should be disseminated , ”says Enrique Scarella, from the Círculo de Villa Ballester.
“Until very recently, when we theorized about educational and sports chess, we used to talk about the gigantic 3 percent. What is that? If, in a territory such as Argentina, which is the world's forefront of chess education , we achieved that 100 percent of children were literate in chess through the educational route during school hours, it would suffice for 3 percent to be attracted to competitive chess to that the number of players will shoot up tremendously ”, says García, who immediately explains how the panorama has now changed.
"Well now it turns out that thanks to the chess boom on the Internet, we are seeing the opposite process. We have many thousands of children and adults playing online . What we should do is take advantage of this to promote the introduction of chess as an educational tool during school hours ”, he concludes.
To take note then ...
