World Championship Yahoos 2025 (1/?)

That title is an obscure reference to last month's Yahoos post, World Championship Yahoos 2024 ('2/2'; December 2024), which was largely about the 2024 World Rapid and Blitz Championships in New York City. I'll come back to that event in a moment.

First let's have some stats. This month's Yahoos post (see the footnote for an explanation of Yahoos) had 104 stories, of which one was an older post from mid-December. Those 104 stories were supplemented by two additional pages: 'Magnus Carlsen on Freestyle chess controversy' with 25 stories, and 'Gukesh beats Mendonca to lead Tata Steel Masters' with 57 stories.

I'll call those additional pages Freestyle stories and Tata stories, making a total of 104+25+57=186 stories. Of the 104 stories, 44 were also about freestyle and Tata, leaving 60 stories about other topics.

I'm covering the freestyle saga on my chess960 blog, because 'freestyle' is one of numerous aliases for chess960. The most recent post on that blog was A Freestyle Fight (January 2025), where the last link to a story was:-

2025-01-22: FIDE Slams Freestyle Chess For Creating 'Unavoidable Divisions,' Threatens Legal Action (chess.com; TarjeiJS)

The dispute is about FIDE's claim to have the exclusive right to any 'World Chess Championship'. I'll refer to January's Google News when I bring that blog up-to-date next month. As for the many Tata stories, one of the most recent was:-

• 2025-01-29: Gukesh wins again in round 10 of the Tata Steel Masters but so do Abdusattorov and Praggnanandhaa (theweekinchess.com)

After rd.10 there remained three rounds to be played. I'd like to say that next month's Yahoos post should have the final result, but I know better. Google News is top-heavy on recent news, usually from the last few days. Case in point: this month there was not a single story on the '2024 World Rapid and Blitz' tournament. I had to refer to my Google News alerts (I receive one combined alert per day) to be able to mention,

• 2025-01-01: Carlsen, Nepomniachtchi Agree To Share World Blitz Title, Ju Wins Women's (chess.com; JackRodgers)

That agreement to share was controversial, as it was not in accordance to the rules of the event. Of the 60 stories about other topics, three were grouped into a headline 'Nodirbek Yakubboev refuses handshake with Indian GM Vaishali', with three more on the same incident scattered around the results. For example,

• 2025-01-27: Explained: Why Uzbekistan's Nodirbek Yakubboev refused to shake hands with R Vaishali at Tata Steel Chess tournament (firstpost.com)

The only 'other' story I found compelling enough to mention appeared twice in the news. As with many of the top stories this month, it doesn't shine a favorable light on chess:-

• 2025-01-29: FIDE extends ban and revokes title of Andrejs Strebkovs over harassment of female players (chessbase.com)

In last month's post '2024 WCC (2/2)', I observed,

After all the positive press that chess has received over the past five years, it's curious that world class chess players are using their new-found status to struggle with dress codes and to call each other names.

This month we have an emerging fight between the world's best player and FIDE, two top players inventing their own rule to decide a major FIDE tournament, a male player refusing to shake hands with a female player, and a serious case of sexual harassment. What will next month bring?

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