COVid19-What's wrong with UK?

[soheil_hooshdaran]

Hello.
How to do chess activity in these CoVID-19 days? ournaments, classes, ...?

[John McKenna]

https://englishchessonline.org.uk/

[soheil_hooshdaran]

So you play on chess,com and lichess.org. How do you arbitrate those events?

[David Sedgwick]

So you play on chess,com and lichess.org. How do you arbitrate those events?

With difficulty.

See the long thread about 4NCL Online, starting at Page 5.

viewtopic.php?f=13&t=10700&start=60

[MJMcCready]

I would hurry up because its going to be banned shortly. There's research showing on-line chess can and does spread Covid.

[David Sedgwick]

I would hurry up because its going to be banned shortly. There's research showing on-line chess can and does spread Covid.

I know that you didn't intend any malice and that I'm going to sound pompous, but:

Please could I make a plea that people don't troll about Covid-19 on here. A lot of people are struggling with their mental health during the lockdown and they include members of this Forum.

Edit: Typo corrected.

[MJMcCready]

Fair point, you can include myself in the list of those struggling, I only know one person who isn't

[Neil Graham]

Fair point, you can include myself in the list of those struggling, I only know one person who isn't

Some considerable time ago I recall some market research was conducted on chess; amongst other things they found was that chess players were statistically significantly more likely to be unmarried and live alone. Possibly that might be a factor here?

[MJMcCready]

He does live alone but doesn't play chess and since he's gay he has always been unmarried. What market research was that you recall? I remember something coming out of a similar nature, around 1989 but it very different results the only bits I remember were that globally chess players have been the most highly sought after of all males by women consistently over the last 500 years.

[John McKenna]

I've not seen any research on the effects of the virus on chess hermits.

However the following fake news (lifted from above) -

"There's research showing on-line chess can and does spread Covid."

Would have been more acceptable if it read -

There's research showing on-line chess can and does spread cheating.

Is research into that topic even strictly necessary (and there's plenty of it going on elsewhere here on the forum and further afield) given the covert nature of most online chess playing?

Until such time as nth-generation arbitbots police the games played online - by using every bit of tech in your environment to spy and report on you - it remains a game of a few cats trying to catch what could amount to an army of mice.

[NickFaulks]

I remember something coming out of a similar nature, around 1989 but it very different results the only bits I remember were that globally chess players have been the most highly sought after of all males by women consistently over the last 500 years.

David Attenborough, if I'm not mistaken. Or was that about hermit crabs?

[MJMcCready]

It wasn't him and the only reference to crabs was every world chess champion got crabs from prostitutes during their career.

[John McKenna]

That Attenborough piece may be out there somewhere.

Not he, below, but another crustacean/human parallel -

http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20141103-hermit-crab

[MJMcCready]

There was an article funded by FIDE which mentions crabs once. It was a list of foods more rather than less likely to increase your ELO rating. I remember crab was quite high up, and something about England highly unlikely to ever have a world champion because of dairylea on toast, cuppasoup, and fish&chips, all of which are frowned upon by FIDE. Think it was published in New In Chess, if not then it was The Sunday Sport...one of the two.

[Reg Clucas]

England highly unlikely to ever have a world champion because of dairylea on toast, cuppasoup

Sounds reasonable to me, although you'll notice I haven't included fish & chips. Maybe replace with pot noodle.