Money Makes the Yahoos Go Round

The past two monthly Yahoo posts -- see the footnote for an explanation of Yahoos -- started,

Of the [1st-COUNT] chess stories returned by Google News for the month of [MONTH], [2nd-COUNT] were about '[HEADLINE]'

To fill in the blanks, see last month's post An Indian-Norwegian Yahoo (May 2024). This month there was no single story that Google News flagged as dominant. Having said that, of the 100 chess stories returned for the month of June by our favorite news source, 12 stories were about the Cairns Cup. For example,

• 2024-06-23: Tan Draws With Kosteniuk, Wins Cairns Cup (chess.com; JackRodgers) • 'GM Tan Zhongyi was crowned as the winner and will receive the $50,000 first prize after a quick draw with GM Alexandra Kosteniuk secured her a 6/9 score in the final round of the Cairns Cup 2024 on Saturday. GM Anna Muzychuk finished on a high note by defeating IM Alice Lee and claimed $40,000 for outright second while draws on the remaining boards led to a four-way tie for third.'

Two other interesting stories (although I freely admit that what is interesting for me is not necessarily interesting for the great majority of the chess world) appeared multiple times in Google News, both with three mentions each. To pick a single mention, the first story was:-

• 2024-06-25: World Champ Magnus Carlsen’s Fantasy Chess Startup Raises $3 Million (forbes.com) • 'Norway-based Fantasy Chess has raised pre-seed funding without a product from investors SNO Ventures, Coatue and funds led by billionaires Yuri Milner and Peter Thiel.'

The second story was:-

• 2024-06-18: Chessify wins the World Corporate Chess Championship (worldcorporate.fide.com) • 'The San Francisco company emerged as victors after defeating the Delaware-based ChessMood team in the finals. Third place went to another U.S. company – the global quantitative trading firm SIG, while the European team UBS ended up in fourth place.'

That World Corporate story continued,

The last day of the World Corporate Championship, organized by FIDE and presented by Freedom Holding, opened with a surprising announcement by FIDE that the 2024 World Rapid and Blitz Championship will be held in New York at the end of December.

And that paragraph deserves a follow-up; ditto for the fantasy chess story. TBD?

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