Chess is not limited to the board. FIDE endorses calculation of Online Tournaments
The ability to reinvent ourselves presents us with a great possibility to create something new from what we already have. And this is what the game of chess is all about. Sports science belongs to the world of thought, and that is why it survives and comes out gracefully from confinements, hand in hand with the Internet, a universal virtual space that hosts a millennial game that has a long history that makes it a world heritage site.
And it is that chess surpassed the physical board, and the face-to-face tournaments, to adopt the virtual mode with resounding success. The pandemic has generated a significant increase in participation, doubling and in some cases tripling the number of users of each chess platform. Such is the case with Chess.com, which has gone from 1.3 million daily active users before the lockdown to 3.1 today.
Twitch reports a staggering increase, leaving behind the 3,000 average viewers it had in January 2020, to eight times the figure that surpassed 24,000 in January 2021.
And these astronomical sums go through the income it has generated for its players. Norwegian chess expert Magnus Carlsen has become the world's highest-earning esports player in 2020. We're talking $ 510,587 in Chess24 prizes, followed by American Grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura, whose winnings amounted to $ 325,000.
Such is the impact that the practice of online chess has had that FIDE, the International Chess Federation, was the first Sports Federation to create an online competition regulation and decided to approve hybrid tournaments, for the official calculation of international rating. . This regulation can be found by clicking here.
The "hybrid" competitions will be held online, in a public place, where there will be some participants and a referee endorsed by FIDE must be present, the procedure is basically that the Federations in charge of uploading the results of said tournaments must request the creation of the same, with at least one week before the start of the first round as indicated in article 0.2 of said regulation. Click here
Undoubtedly, we continue to bet on sports science, the protégés of Caissa know the benefits of chess in our biopsychosocial development, and that is why we are enthusiastic about those who have just discovered it and are conquered. We are living and enjoying the greatest expansion of chess through the Internet window.
