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World Chess Championships - Magnus Carlsen Wins!

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Comments

  • #62
    Sparks
    Registered Users Posts: 40,055 ✭✭✭✭Sparks


    Interesting article in the Guardian about the championships, written after game four...
    The world's greatest game – so why have we fallen out of love with chess?
    The world championship between Vishy Anand and Magnus Carlsen is finely poised, but sadly chess is still ignored

    ...

    The sadness is that the mainstream media in the UK aren't following the games very closely. I'm old enough to remember not just the great match in Reykjavik between the crazed American Bobby Fischer and the suave Russian Boris Spassky in 1972, which was headline news for months, but the matches between Anatoly Karpov and Viktor Korchnoi in 1978 and 1981, which used to get decent-sized daily news reports. Now, apart from occasional short items by underused chess correspondents, there is nothing in the UK press.

    Despite there being 20,000 committed club chess players in the UK, several hundred thousand casual players and a strong chess presence in schools, especially at primary level, this great event is being seriously under-reported. What coverage there has been is of Carlsen, who is portrayed as a kind of geeky Matt Damon. There is no attempt to get to grips with the actual chess.

    The game has slipped off the mainstream media agenda in the UK. In India and Norway, there is of course huge excitement about the match – Norwegian news websites crashed when, in a tournament in London in March, Carlsen qualified to play for the world championship, and they were buzzing on Wednesday when it seemed their hero was getting on top.

    ...continues


  • #63
    cdeb
    Moderators, Sports Moderators Posts: 7,142 Mod ✭✭✭✭cdeb


    Similar can be said for a lot of games, I think. Snooker, for example - massive in the 80s, but struggling now with few enough new players coming through onto the tour. (If you want a trip back in time, try reading 32-62 in the world rankings)

    I think in part, marketing has gotten to the stage where some sports (the Premiership being the obvious example) are so popular they drown everything else out, and people latch onto them, often for reasons of self-esteem. We're so blinded by all that, and by fitting in with everyone, that we're almost scared to try something different.


  • #64
    Sparks
    Registered Users Posts: 40,055 ✭✭✭✭Sparks


    Interesting interview with Anand on ChessVibes. Nice to see players at that level being level-headed and having a degree of humility.


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