2021 CJA Award Entries

It's been two months since I posted about the 2021 CJA Awards Announcement (May 2021), so it's time to look at the entries. In last year's post, 2020 CJA Award Entries (July 2020), I was critical of the entry process, mainly because the list of entries -- as far as I could see -- was disorganized and hard to understand.

The CJA appears to have learned from that unfortunate exercise and has improved the presentation of the entries by an order of magnitude. There are two pages listing the entries:-

• 2021 CJA Awards Entry List (chessjournalism.org)
• 2021 Chess Journalist of the Year Entries (ditto)

That first link, 'Awards Entry List', is particularly useful. Every single entry is associated with a link leading to an online, digital copy of the entry, using drive.google.com where there is no online copy available directly from its source. I didn't count the number of entries, but there might well be over 100, enough chess literature to keep the most ardent enthusiast occupied for months to come.

In the category 'Best Online Blog', there are four entries. This might be the most competitive year for the blog category in the 15+ years (I've lost track) that I've been following the CJA awards. A sure winner is the Chess Life cover for August 2020, titled 'New Chess Boom'. It was nominated in two categories : 'Best Art' and 'Best Single Chess Magazine Cover'.

The award winners will be announced in early August. I'll follow up this current post as soon after that as I can.