Ghosts of Christmas Past

After spending last Christmas mingling with the World Champions -- see Merry Christmas! from a Family of Blogs (December 2019) -- the annual Christmas post returns to its roots, only to find that the chess landscape has been devastated by a coronavirus, aka Covid-19. Here's what the landscape looked like a year ago, thanks to Mark Crowther's 'The Week in Chess', aka TWIC.

TWIC 1311 & TWIC 1312
(published on Mondays)

We'll come back in a few weeks to compare with TWIC 1363 & TWIC 1364 (or something like that). In the meantime have a Merry Christmas! and please drive safely.

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Later: Re 'We'll come back in a few weeks to compare with TWIC 1363 & TWIC 1364', here are the TOCs for the Christmas TWICs of yearend 2000.

On the left we see both the 'Sunway Sitges Festival' and the 'Kazakhstan Cup', so the time frames for 1999 and 2000 are roughly equivalent. 'Active Team Events', the second-to-last item for both weeks in 1999 was missing completely in 2000. In 1999 there were 43 and 37 items in each of the two weeks; in 2000 there were 28 and 23 items, a significant reduction.

Ignoring the first item and the last item(s) in the list, the boilerplate items, the upshot is that there were approximately two-thirds the number of events in 2000 when compared to the previous year. Maybe I'll come back to this at the end of 2021, to estimate how much of a recovery was made in 2021.

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A Year Later: Re 'the time frames for 1999 and 2000 are roughly equivalent', huh? Seems I lost 20 years while writing that note! On the principle that...

Laugh and the world laughs with you, cry and you cry in your soup.

...I'll add this post to category 'Gaffes' and leave it at that. All's well that ends well.