The Greek Freak, Naka, MVL and a new puzzle?
For the expanding but still quite petty world of online chess, there is a new hero and a new villain all in one, in the ever winning, ever smiling face of, well, to bypass 1000 different misspellings, let's call him Jimakos @jimis98. Now, the general audience, in all truth, does not really know what chess is, the majority still thinks it is about Danny's relationship interventions for the two loves of his life, Robert and Hess. But yesterday's dominating performance by Ladopoulos led to a lengthy comedy of logical errors, side taking, wild speculations and annoyance on the part of several chess pros, Naka included but MVL "the victim" excluded. I am mostly a fan of Hikaru's online work, but we all know he gets salty after bad results, and I remember him being annoyed at this new generation of PuzzleRush freaks as soon they took away his number 1 spot, I believe as early as 2018.
Luckily, most sane people understand this is not chess, despite the puzzles mostly being extracted from real chess games. Among other things, most of us semi-pros have often felt, damn, I can find these combos and checkmates, but I cannot reach these winning positions against good players, often not even the drawing positions. In fact, I would like to suggest a new, sadly even less chess-y puzzle, the 960rush. In this online or (Alireza @firouzja2003 might appreciate this more) real board , real pieces adrenaline pumper, you are given Fischerrandom starting positions and, racing against the clock, you play in order to bring them back to the classical starting position, if you manage you get the next position etc. To achieve this feat we merely have to add the ability of pawns to go back to their initial positions. Perhaps some purist would settle for a modified starting position with all pawns on the third rank, quite an intriguing twist. And yes, Firo, if you knock pieces over you will have to place them correctly before continuing 
.
Towards the end of the online chat sessions, we had somewhat surreal demands that Jimakos proves his skills, or develops his skills, over the board. While this is likely to happen as soon as (if ever) Jimakos moves closer to a chess metropolis/Mecca instead of his little Greek town, people like MVL and Roeland Pruijssers came forward to suggest Jimakos has got nothing to prove, nothing to apologize for. It will be funny to see Jimakos getting invitations both to the c24/Magnus equivalent show, as well as to the chess Mecca of St Louis. With the economy still in a mess in Greece, and Dimitrios' excellent memory a chess scholarship seems to be a given. If I find the time and motivation, I might take a much closer look at his performance. Meanwhile Jimako, live and prosper!
Gratuitous plug: Africans needed for my Black Champ Project https://www.chess.com/news/view/africa-unite
