Business Yahoos

The last post of the month not falling into a regularly scheduled series means it's time for a Yahoo post. What's a Yahoo post? See the footnote at the end of this current post for a brief explanation.

Last month we concentrated on Guardian Yahoos (April 2021), where the name was taken because The Guardian had 'the best showing I've seen by a non-chess source'.

On the left is the start of the summary of the past month's sources for the top-100 stories flagged by Google News. In addition to the nine sources shown with two or more stories each, there were 45 other sources with a single story.

As usual, Chess.com heads the list, this time with a little more than one third of the stories. A list of the headlines from the Chess.com stories would make a respectable summary of all chess news for the month, but then they wouldn't be Yahoos. I still might do such a list if I ever figure out a simple way to convert from the Google News style of presenting the relative date of a story -- e.g. '11 hours ago' or '22 days ago' -- to a real date.

Of the nine sources shown, the first four are top sources of chess news, followed by The Guardian, followed by four sources of mainstream news. Let's start with the two stories from PRNewswire, where 'PR' is an acronym for 'press release':-

• 2021-05-25: Grand Chess Tour Partners With Vivendi To Kick Off Chess Platform Kasparovchess.com (prnewswire.com)
• 2021-05-21: CryptoChamps Chess Tournament Powered by Coinbase is June 12-13 (ditto)

The Kasparov story was picked up by a few other sources. I might come back to it if it doesn't fizzle as fast as many Kasparov stories. Garry has a habit of grabbing the microphone from other chess personalities who happen to be in the spotlight. This time it looks like a reaction to the boom brought on by the twin phenomena of (1) the interest in online chess during the covid pandemic, and (2) the interest in the Netflix release of 'Queen's Gambit'.

The crypto tournament merits a separate post and I'll come back to it as soon as I can. In fact, there were two such tournaments announced during the past month.

As for Netflix and its adaptation of 'The Queen's Gambit', it appears to have run its course. I found only one story in May:-

• 2021-05-20: 'Queen’s Gambit' Costume Designer Makes Clothes Fit for a Chess Queen (indiewire.com) • 'Costume designer Gabriele Binder and series creator Scott Frank explained that much of Beth's sense of fashion is an attempt at imitation, at trying on different personas.'

Before signing off this post, I looked at the last source in the list, where its full name is 'Wisconsin Public Radio News'. In fact, the two references were on the same topic:-

• 2021-05-26: Milwaukee Resident Starts Neighborhood Chess Club (wpr.org) • 'A new chess club has formed in Milwaukee after a Bay View resident tried to find a community chess club for her 14-year-old son and posted online to find others who wanted to play. We talk with her about her passion for chess and what the new club has to offer.'

Good for her. How many titled chess players have started a local chess club? Not many, I imagine.

[Yahoos (mainstream news stories about chess) are derived from Google News top-100 (or so) stories from the past month.]

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Follow-up: Crypto Chess (May 2021).