It's Not an April Fool's Joke

You've seen the publicity: Announcing The $1,000,000 Chess.com World Championship (chess.com). Now watch the trailer!

Announcing The $1,000,000 Chess.com World Championship (?:??) • '[Published on] Apr 21, 2022'

Hey, wait a minute! Now it says, 'Video unavailable; This video is private'. I watched the clip yesterday and recorded the description, which said,

With $1,000,000 in prizes, we are excited to announce the Chess.com World Championship! Prepare for open qualifiers, play-in and knockout rounds featuring the world's best chess players, and you! Take part in this record-breaking event by verifying your Chess.com profile!

Yes, the video was sort of silly. It started with an inside joke -- 'World Hess Hampionship' -- seen in Chess.com's broadcasts of the last *real* World Championship, the 2021 Carlsen - Nepomniachtchi match. If you don't get the joke, see the 'CHR' column in a post from my main blog, A Trio of World Championship Video Makers (December 2021). Sorry I can't be more specific about which round the joke appeared. It was worth a smile at the time, but that was nearly six months ago.

My guess is that someone pulled the plug on the video because the subject is serious, but the video wasn't. It's not every day a chess site announces a World Chess Championship of its own. Why would they turn around and make fun of it? As an April Fool's joke maybe, but they missed that by three weeks. A few days after the Chess.com announcement, there was a similar announcement from another online chess play site: Announcing the Lichess World Championship (lichess.org).

Are these real World Chess Championships? In my opinion, no, they aren't, but I'm just one voice in the court of public opinion that decides such matters. I think they're more like site championships. I'll come back to the subject if public opinion eventually disagrees with me.

2022 Grand Prix, Wrapup

2022 Grand Prix; Berlin / Belgrade, I've already posted six times:-

• 2022-02-02: 2022 Grand Prix & Candidates
• 2022-02-23: 2022 Grand Prix Regulations (cont.)
• 2022-03-02: 2022 Grand Prix, 1st Leg (Berlin)
• 2022-03-16: 2022 Grand Prix, 2nd Leg (Belgrade)
• 2022-04-06: 2022 Grand Prix, 3rd Leg (Berlin)
• 2022-04-13: 2022 Grand Prix, Final Actions

At the end of that last post, 'Final Actions', I noted,

Not done: Add the 25 players to the Index of Players.

Consider it done -- see World Chess Championship : Index of Players -- and that's a wrap! Congratulations to World Chess for the most interesting of the six Grand Prix events that started with the 2008-2009 Grand Prix.

2022 Grand Prix, Final Actions

In the previous post, 2022 Grand Prix, 3rd Leg (April 2022), I left myself with three actions: 'Still to do on my page'. First I added the PGN and total Grand Prix points to 2022 Grand Prix; Berlin / Belgrade (m-w.com).

Then I created the chart shown on the left. It lists the 25 players who participated in the three legs of the 2022 Grand Prix, their total score across the events in which they played ('Tot'), and the number of games played in the events ('Gms').

The last column shows the number of events in which each player participated ('Tnmt'). Two players participated in a single event and were substituted in their second event. I should say more about the substitutions, but I'll save that for another time.

Not done: Add the 25 players to the Index of Players. I had hoped to do that for this post, but I ran out of time. I'll schedule one last post for this long and complicated event.

2022 Grand Prix, 3rd Leg (Berlin)

Three weeks after 2022 Grand Prix, 2nd Leg (March 2022), the third and final leg concluded in Berlin. I added the various crosstables for the last leg to my page 2022 Grand Prix : Berlin / Belgrade, II-IV (m-w.com). Following the lead set in the '2nd Leg' post, here are TWIC introductions ('by Mark Crowther') from the weeks when the event took place:-

• TWIC1428, 2022-03-21 • 'Russian players are competing under the FIDE flag in the final leg of the FIDE Grand Prix series which starts tomorrow.'
• TWIC1429, 2022-03-28 • 'The three event FIDE Grand Prix is not over but the main issue has been decided, Richard Rapport and Hikaru Nakamura take the final Candidates places. Nakamura was in a group with Levon Aronian and lost his first game to him but came back to score 4/5 including a revenge win against Aronian.'
• TWIC1430, 2022-04-04 • 'Wesley So defeated Hikaru Nakamura in the final of the final FIDE Grand Prix but the two Candidates places had long been decided in favour of Nakamura and Richard Rapport.'

Still to do on my page:-

• Add the PGN for the third leg.
• Add the spreadsheet showing total Grand Prix points allocated.
• Calculate the total score for each player over the three legs.
• Add the event to the Index of Players for all participants.

TWIC1430 had another comment on the current cycle:-

Ding Liren scored 10.5/12 in a tournament entirely arranged to produce enough games with the right results to qualify him for the Candidates if Sergey Karjakin is suspended for the event. Whilst Ding does belong in the Candidates and seems to have been one of the worst affected players by the Covid-19 crisis this whole event was really not a proper tournament at all.

I'll look at that in another post.