The Last Yahoo

No question mark here, as there was in The Last Sociology Post? earlier this week. The July Yahoo post, A Cheating Yahoo, was definitely the last in the monthly Yahoo series. In August, the Yahoo news feed served zero headlines relevant to chess. That makes the fifth dry month since the beginning of the year. Yahoo posts need Yahoo stories.

When this happened in the past, I used the Google chess news feed to select a story that I would have liked to see in the Yahoo feed. This month I selected

• 2019-08-22: Russian Chess Legend Karpov Unable to Get U.S. Visa, His Friend Says (themoscowtimes.com; Reuters) • 'Russian chess grandmaster Anatoly Karpov has been unable for several months to obtain a visa to travel to the United States, his friend, the owner of a chess academy in New York [GM Maxim Dlugy] who invited him to teach a summer camp there, said on Wednesday.'

The story went on to explain,

"This processing cannot be waived or expedited as it is crucial for the final decision regarding the issuance of a visa," the [Moscow] embassy's public liaison unit said in a July 2 letter to [U.S. Representative Carolyn Maloney's] office. "Mr. Karpov will be notified as soon as this process is complete. Be assured that as of today, no further documents or actions are needed from Mr. Karpov," the embassy said.

Another story I would have been happy to use was:-

• 2019-08-26: Chess Player Study Shows Intelligence Alone Isn't Enough to Become a Master; "Intelligence and practice are intertwined." (inverse.com) • 'Even for someone who’s super smart, becoming a skilled chess player requires lots and lots of practice. By the same token, practice isn’t everything. New research in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that it’s crucial to understand how practice interacts with intelligence if we want understand how a person got to be at the top of their game.'

But wait! There's more:-

In a paper published on Monday, an international team of researchers outlined the results of a longitudinal study that gathered data on 90 chess players over their lifetimes. By looking at how these factors affect one another, they showed that more intelligent players benefited more from practice.

Who would have guessed? And with that coda, the Chess for All Ages Yahoo team bids, 'Sayonara!'