World Championship Yahoos 2023

Less than a year and a half after World Championship Yahoos 2021 (November 2021), we once again find the World Chess Championship dominating the chess news. For the most recent post on my blog devoted to the subject, see yesterday's 2023 Nepomniachtchi - Ding Liren, Third Week (April 2023). Before we get to the same subject on the blog that you're reading now, let's have the vital statistics.

This month we had 102 Yahoos (see the footnote for an explanation of the curious term 'Yahoos'), with nine news sources accounting for two or more Yahoos each. Those nine are shown in the chart on the left and account for a total of 48 stories. That leaves 54 sources with a single story.

As usual, Chess.com accounted for the greatest number of stories, with nearly a third of Google News total output. ChessBase was a distant, although respectable second, accounting for eight stories. The chart shows only seven ChessBase stories, because 'ChessBase India' was counted as a Yahoo with a single story.

Of the 54 sources with a single story, only three of the stories were about the World Championship. The most unusual of the three was:-

• 2023-03-31: The World Chess Championship Could Be Muted For A Decade (forbes.com) • 'Basketball star Damian Lillard recently sparked conversation by saying NBA championships are over-hyped and a poor measure of a player’s legacy in the league. It was a "love of the game" perspective pushing back against the commercial value of a postseason that lasts about two months. Lillard said the regular season "journey" has been diminished.
  
  In the chess world, the International Chess Federation (FIDE) World Chess Championship is about to become somewhat inconsequential because the world’s undisputed best player decided to vacate his title, despite showing no signs of slowing down with chess in general.'

There's much more to be said about the 'World Championship Yahoos', but I'm running late and have run out of time. I'll come back to it later.

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

***

Later: Of the nine sources listed on this month's top Yahoos, one I couldn't remember seeing before is 'EL PAÍS' [El Pais]. The three stories Google News highlighted were:-

• 2023-04-16: Chess was once banned in China. Today, the country wants to win the World Chess Championship (elpais.com; Leontxo García) • 'Fifty years ago, during the Cultural Revolution, the authorities in the Asian giant fined players and burned chess books. But today, Ding Liren, who is competing for China, is fighting to become the champion who will succeed Magnus Carlsen, the Norwegian grandmaster.'
• 2023-04-20: Ian Nepomniachtchi: A meticulous Russian who opposes the invasion of Ukraine (ditto) • 'Those around the second-best chess player in the world believe that the current champion, Magnus Carlsen, advised his rival, Ding Liren, before the World Championship.'
• 2023-04-24: President of Russian Chess Federation takes aim at Nepomniachtchi: 'He’s a monkey with a hand grenade' (ditto) • 'Ranked second in the world, the player is currently leading against Ding Liren at the World Championship with four games to go, but he is under pressure for his rejection of the invasion of Ukraine.'

As it turned out, this was just my memory playing tricks on me. See last year's Candidate and Olympiad Yahoos (July 2022), and its follow-up Was Fischer Avaricious? (August 2022), for an earlier story featured on this blog. For more from the Spanish journalist, see Articles written by Leontxo García (elpais.com). And for more about the journalist himself, see Leontxo García (wikipedia.org). It starts,

Leontxo García Olasagasti (born February 12, 1956, in Irún, Guipúzcoa) is a Spanish lecturer, presenter, commentator and journalist specialized in chess.

As for the 'monkey with a hand grenade' remark, let's hope it's the last time we hear this sort of veiled threat. In the story, the speaker of the remark is identified as Andrei Filatov.