Match Tales from the Twittersphere

The much anticipated 2018 Carlsen - Caruana World Championship match starts tomorrow and journalistic protocol requires at least a perfunctory nod. What is Twitter saying about it?

On top of writing about the match itself, the Twitter angle gives me the chance to try another of the Algorithmia (AI?) services that I first used in From Black & White to Brown & Blue (October 2018). The particular service is Retrieve Tweets With Keyword (algorithmia.com). I fed it the three keywords 'chess carlsen caruana' and it spit out text examples of the 500 most recent tweets/retweets on the subject, in reverse chronological order, the earliest from yesterday. The 'retweets' aspect means that the same tweets are repeated over-and-over-and-over, most of which are a link to a source other than Twitter.

Of all the standalone tweets that I looked at, the most interesting is shown below. I initially tried to use the tweet embedded directly into this post, but the dimensions of the photo broke the blog container. I couldn't see a way to fix this quickly, so I resorted to a screen capture and shrank it.

https://twitter.com/seaningle/status/1060533865259954177

As for linked articles, the Twittersphere gave me three from Chess.com:-

• 2018-10-08: World Chess Championship 2018: Carlsen-Caruana; Peter Doggers
• 2018-11-01: Carlsen, Caruana Top Rating List Before World Championship; ditto
• 2018-11-07: 13 Things To Know About The Carlsen vs Caruana World Chess Championship; Jonathan Tisdall, 'My first feature via a major chess platform'

Of the non-chess sources flagged by Twitter, another handful appeared over-and-over-and-over:-

• 2018-11-07: Magnus Carlsen And Fabiano Caruana's Fight For The World Chess Championship Is Going To Be So Fun (deadspin.com) • 'It’s a phenomenal time to be a chess fan.'
• 2018-11-07: America's Chance at Chess Dominance Is in the Hands of One Young Player (si.com)
• 2018-11-07: Interview: How yoga and hip-hop helped Fabiano Caruana challenge for the world chess championship (theguardian.com)
• 2018-11-08: US chess prodigy Fabiano Caruana eyes world title in London as he takes on Norwegian Magnus Carlsen (standard.co.uk)

As for the oldest of the 500 tweets/retweets, the distinction goes to another article from Chess.com:-

• 2018-11-06: Carlsen vs Caruana: CAPS Predicts The 2018 World Chess Championship; Smarter Chess

As interesting as the Algorithmia exercise was, I could have saved a lot of time with a straight Twitter query:-

twitter.com/search?q=carlsen+caruana.

Next time I'll just do that.