Mediaboss Marketing

By LEONTXO GARCAEvery day, more and more people have less free time to just think in a world that is increasingly fast, changing, frivolous and unfair. This makes now the best moment to promote a game that teaches people to think (proven by scientific studies) and is on the rise thanks to the pandemic and the popularity of the TV series The Queens Gambit.

Since 2003, Gibraltar has brought the world an innovative vision of chess. The first thing a visitor to the La Caleta hotel will see is large photographs of some of the best female chess players in the world, competing in the last of the four FIDE Womens Grand Prix tournaments; the previous three having been contested in Moscow, Lausanne and Montecarlo.

These portraits illustrate Gibraltars contribution to the mental sport par excellence, adding needed reinforcement to its two weakest facets: image-marketing (in countries such as the former Soviet Union, where chess was a national passion, the concept was irrelevant) and the gender gap (where there is one woman playing chess for every ten men).

At the same time, Gibraltar is one of the few territories that is nearly out of the dismal tunnel of a pandemic where homo sapiens has behaved more like homo idiotus. Nobody (for example, none of the G20 countries) paid the slightest notice to the scientists warning from as far back as 2012: the greatest threat to humanity is not Islamic terrorism, it is pandemic disease.

Donald Trump, manifestly a racist and misogynist compulsive liar, received 63 million votes in 2016 and 74 million in 2020. Nigel Farage admitted, the day after the Brexit referendum, that his campaign had been based on fabrications. Jair Bolsonaro plans the destruction of the Amazon rainforest (which would most probably precipitate new pandemics), but the rest of the world seems unfazed by this. The list of feats of homo idiotus is long indeed.*********Learning through play is one of the important innovations in the 21st century education, but humans and animals have always learned by playing. Chess has a documented history going back 1,500 years. The Moors brought it to the Iberian Peninsula via north Africa at the end of the 8th century. The modern version, with the Queen as the most powerful piece, was born in Spain at the end of the 15th century and arrived in America a little after that.

Merely playing chess regularly is educational. Among the many other qualities it engenders, it develops the following: attention span, concentration, memory, self-control, forethought, objective analysis, logical decision-making, respect for the rules and for the opponent, learning how to win and lose gracefully, self-analysis and adaptability to a changing reality.

This last quality will be one of the most valuable of the 21st century; in the last 25 years, the world has changed as much or more than at any other period of history and experts predict that the next 25 will be even more revolutionary.********

But chess employed as an educational tool in the classroom is even better, as many scientific studies can show. It develops cognitive, emotional and implementational intelligence, as well as improving academic outcomes in mathematics and reading comprehension.

The EU parliament recommended this in 2012, 415 MEPs voting in favour, and the Spanish Parliament did so unanimously. Since then, 10 of the 17 Autonomous Communities of Spain have introduced chess into the curriculum in some fashion. Four of these programs, Andalucias, Aragons, Catalonias and the Canary Islands, have being highlighted by FIDE as models of good practice.********At this point, the million-dollar question arises. What do you remove from the curriculum to make room for chess? My answer is nothing, at least in the early stages.

The method that has been working in Andalucia since 2017, amongst other places, is a transversal and interdisciplinary approach. For example, geometry, arithmetic and algebra can be introduced in an efficient and fun manner through chess. Or world history can be taught in parallel with the 1,500-year story of the game. Or chess can be taught during foreign language lessons.

Before the pandemic, the Junta de Andalucias official program, AulaDjaque, brought together 606 schools, some 7,500 teachers and 135,000 students. Add the private schools and extracurricular clubs and the number of Andalucian students connected to chess could rise to 400,000.

School teachers need an elementary knowledge of chess for the educational benefits to come through, a workshop of 8 12 hours would suffice. Surveys show that 80% of teachers in Catalonia, where the program began in 2012, approve of the program, a high percentage compared to similar innovative educational projects instituted by the Generalitat.

What is occurring with greater frequency (I understand that it is happening in Aragon, in Santa Fe in Argentina, and in Uruguay) is that, after two or three years of the interdisciplinary methods, chess is promoted to having its own timeslot in the curriculum with the appropriate objectives at each stage of the school experience.

The most striking results are with children in the 3 6-year-old group. Obviously, they are not expected to play the game but they use it, along with music and dance, on giant checker-boards where the children play the part of chess pieces. In this way, school teachers can work on many of the pedagogical objectives at this age: laterality, psychomotricity, attention, memory, concentration, elementary geometry, respect for the rules and for the opponent...

This has two enormous advantages. Firstly, it is much easier to insert chess into the curriculum at this stage than in Primary or Secondary school. If 100% of children are introduced to the game early, it is easier to utilise chess as an educational tool in later development.

Furthermore, chess is very inclusive, which grants it a great social and therapeutic potential. The Albert Einstein Institute in New York has highlighted how it delays the deterioration of the brain, and therefore Alzheimers. Closer to Gibraltar, Extremadura has collected more than ten years of experience of the game being used as a treatment for the elderly and sufferers of Downs syndrome, cerebral palsy, severe mental illnesses, ADHD, autism and Aspergers, as well as its use in prisons, drug rehabilitation clinics and other similar spaces. The National Organisation for the Blind in Spain (ONCE) has always given special emphasis on its chess program.********Gibraltars prosperity can be attributed to its mixture of cultures, and with the creativity the inhabitants had to develop to survive the thirty years after the criminal closure of the frontier with Spain unilaterally imposed by the dictator, Francisco Franco, in 1969.Connecting its image with that of chess, a game that promotes intelligent thought in a world where it is increasingly lacking, is without doubt an outstanding move.

Leontxo Garca has been the chess correspondent of El Pais since 1985, FIDE councillor for educational chess since 2018 and is a curator of Spains pavilion at the Expo Dubai 2021.

See the article here:
The world needs chess more than ever - Gibraltar Chronicle

The 2021 Junior Speed Chess Championship presented by ChessKid is an online competition for top Junior chess players. The event runs from June 7 through August 8. There's a total prize fund of $35,000 for the competition.

All matches of the 2021 Junior Speed Chess Championship will be broadcast live on Chess.com/TV and our Twitch channel, with expert commentary by GMs Robert Hess, Daniel Naroditsky, Aman Hambleton, FM Mike Klein, and other guests. Fans can also keep up with the event by going to our Events page.

Below you can see a list of the confirmed players so far:

Europe Qualifier

Asia Qualifier

Americas Qualifier

Global Qualifier

Main Event

The bracket of the event will be posted here.

The qualifiers for the event will run from June 7 through June 21, while the main event will happen from July 4 to August 8, as detailed below:

Qualifiers

Main Event

The event counts with a total prize fund of $35,000, distributed as follows:

Qualifiers: $10,000 prize pool

Main Event: $25,000 prize pool

In each match of the main event, half the corresponding prize pool for each round will go to the winner, while the other half will be divided between the two players based on their winning percentages in that round.

Qualifier

Main Event

View post:
2021 Junior Speed Chess Championship: All The Information - Chess.com

The enormous popularity of Netflixs The Queens Gambit limited series took editor Michelle Tesoro by surprise. She thinks the pandemic played some part in keeping people confined to their homes, and once viewers got a glimpse of Anya Taylor-Joy as determined orphan chess prodigy Beth Harmon, they were hooked. And then, of course, the 60s glam appeal of sex, drugs, alcohol, and rock music kicked in, along with the fascination of chess as a metaphor for power and control in a male-dominated sport.

But the editorial objective from the outset was finding the sweet spot between the right amount of chess and the emphasis on Taylor-Joys beguiling face. In fact, after cutting Netflixs acclaimed western Godless with writer-director Scott Frank, Tesoro was particularly conscious of pacing on The Queens Gambit. We had a lot of conversations about pacing after I read two drafts of the script, because I remember feeling that, although a lot of people like Godless, there were episodes that were quite long and mightve felt too slow to some people, she said.

However, the pace of Franks script for The Queens Gambit (adapted from the Walter Tevis novel) was much tighter. It wasnt languid and really moved forward at a clip, Tesoro continued. I just wanted to make sure that when he described a lot of information in one continuous shot that they were planned in such a way that they fit into the overall pace. I warned him that if you have a choreographed shot that youve written in, that its [justified]. I didnt want to be constrained by a oner.

Netflix

But Tesoro was quite fond of a long shot of Beth walking up the stairs of the hotel in Mexico City in Episode 4 (Middle Game), where the camera continues above her and then swings down to catch up with her as she checks in for her chess tournament. We made sure that the pacing of the scenes before and after allowed us to take a breathing moment there, she added. Yet the editor wisely broke up the 360-degree pan early in Episode 1 (Openings) during the flashback of the car crash, cutting back and forth between the tragic childhood memory and its impact on the chess match with Soviet world champion Vasily Borgov (Marcin Dorociski).

Thats the balance we wanted to achieve with her point of view, but being purposeful with how scenes are covered so we could manipulate them with more control later on in order to keep the pace, said Tesoro (the ACE Eddie Award winner for The Queens Gambit). The question became: What is too much chess? In first episode, which focuses on nine-year-old Beth (Isla Johnston) learning chess at the orphanage, Frank shot two hours of footage that had to be trimmed in half, mostly dealing with complete chess games, to get a feel for the game. But, after establishing Beths genius (she hallucinates a chessboard on the ceiling and moves the pieces like animal friends), the editor and director found the right amount of chess so they could concentrate on Beths rite of passage in becoming the worlds greatest chess player.

Phil Bray/Netflix

After the orphanage, he said to me: You know, I think the show will be much better if we play the faces and the drama and not the chess. Less chess, more faces, Tesoro said. So we would either turn a whole game sequence into a montage or pull [footage] into a montage about learning how to play chess. It suddenly became a drama about studying faces, particularly Beths, whos obsessed with chess yet cant win without the help of tranquilizers and alcohol. And, like her depressed mother (Chloe Pirrie), who was a math genius, Beth is also socially dysfunctional and headed toward self-destruction.

But the cold open flashbacks, in which Beths mom tries to prepare her daughter for the harsh realities of life, were Franks invention. These help set up Episode 2 (Exchanges), in which teenage Beth gains early success in chess tournaments and grows closer to her adopted mom, Alma (filmmaker Marielle Haller). She travels on the road with Beth and lives vicariously through her, while battling depression and her own addiction to tranquilizers and alcohol.

Netflix

This episode is where we find the rhythm for the whole show and also establish Beth and her new life and the way shes going to play chess, Tesoro said. With having the intro of Alma in it, there was also a lightness to complement Beths intensity that made it a fun episode. And there was a levity to Beth as well. What I like about Scotts writing is theres always a sense of humor to temper the dark side in how his characters view people and interact with them, which makes them relatable.

Thanks to the pandemic, Tesoro had more time to edit while being confined to the apartment the production set up for her in Chelsea, New York. It allowed her to get more deeply into the final cut.The time I spent on it wasnt as stressed because I had nothing else to do, she said. [Beth] spent a lot of time alone in her head and thats what everybody else had been doing. The show was in a different time period so you could escape what was happening during the pandemic.

Sign Up: Stay on top of the latest breaking film and TV news! Sign up for our Email Newsletters here.

Excerpt from:
The Queens Gambit: Finding the Balance Between Chess and Anya Taylor-Joys Character Arc - IndieWire

With Bradley Beal, Russell Westbrook, and the rest of the Washington Wizards now in the rearview mirror, its time for the Philadelphia 76ers to turn their undivided attention to the Atlanta Hawks. Whether Joel Embiid and his partially torn miniscus end up active or not, the Sixers goal in the second round remains the same:

Slow down Trae Young.

Notice how I didnt outright say stop, as such a feat is borderline impossible. The Hawks third-year guard has developed into quite the wizard on the offensive side of the ball, mastering the art of creating space and drawing fouls regardless of whos guarding him. Young averaged 25.3 points and 9.4 assists per game this past season, and pretty much all of his numbers jumped up a tick during his first career playoff series.

Across the five games that were played (Atlanta beat New York 4-1), Young averaged 29.2 points and 9.8 assists per game, while shooting 44.1% from the field and 91.9% from the free throw line.

Okay, so weve established that Trae Young can score the basketball, its not like that was necessarily news heading into this years postseason anyways. The question is how can the Sixers slow him down over the course of a multi-game series. With Embiid potentially missing a good chunk of time due to his knee injury, Doc Rivers is in a position where he isnt going to necessarily want to get into high-scoring affairs on a consistent basis.

Similar to how they attacked Bradley Beal, the Philadelphia 76ers best bet when it comes to stunting Youngs offensive production is by sending him multiple different looks, every single game. Ben Simmons and his elite length should be able to neutralize Young for extended periods of time, Matisse Thybulle is the definition of a pest on the defensive side of things, Danny Green and his veteran experience should allow him to hang with Young for a few possessions at a time.

Even Seth Curry, whose physical stature better aligns with Youngs, could give Doc Rivers a few minutes on the Hawks high-scoring guard here or there.

Guarding Trae Young isnt as simple as designating one defender (Simmons, Green, Thybulle) with stopping him over the course of a game, because Young is simply too good at drawing fouls at a high rate. If you stick Simmons on Young for all four quarters, you could be looking at a scenario where Simmons is in foul trouble by the time halftime rolls around. The same goes with Green and Thybulle two players you want on the court for the closing minutes.

Instead, Doc Rivers needs to take a chess-like approach to things, shuffling different pieces around until Trae Young finds himself checkmated with nowhere to go. Frustrating him with constant new looks should wear him down over the course of a full playoff series.

Ultimately speaking, Young is still going to find a way to get his. Hell likely finish the series averaging 25+, and will probably pop off for 40+ on one or two occasions. However, all Doc Rivers and the Sixers have to do is slow him down just long enough to secure the series win, something that they should be equipped to do based on their current roster construction.

The rest is here:
The Philadelphia 76ers have the chess pieces to slow down Trae Young - Section 215

World Chess Hall of Fame opens new chess exibitions in Saint Louis.

Pawns & Passports: Chess Sets from Around the Globefeatures chess sets from more than 30 countries, demonstrating how people from different regions have transformed the pieces to reflect their culture and history. Visitors will discover the stories behind the WCHOF's diverse collection and learn how chess has captured the imagination of people around the world.

Highlights fromPawns & Passportsinclude a Makonde carved wood chess set, featuring elegant, elongated pieces; a mid-20th-century Japanese chess set, featuring an emperor and his court carved in intricate detail; and a Hungarian silver and copper enamel chess set and board, which features inset jade and amethyst.

"After more than a year of travel restrictions due to the pandemic, we wanted to give viewers an opportunity to take a trip around the globe," said WCHOF's Emily Allred, curator of the exhibition. "From beautiful decorative antique chess sets made from luxury materials to intricately carved chess sets celebrating theculture of different regions, the exhibition demonstrates how chess has captured the imagination of people around the world."

Check, Please! Chess Dining & Decorhighlights more than 150 artifacts including food and drink-themed chess sets, chess-inspired tableware, utensils and decor from the collection of the WCHOF. Guests can explore immersive environments, including a chess-themed bar and diner, that display artifacts as they were originally intended to be used.

Check, Please!highlights include a newly acquired 3D-printed breakfast-themed chess set, photography of Russian grandmaster Boris Spassky eating watermelon during a break in a tennis game in 1972 before losing to Grandmaster Bobby Fischer in the World Chess Championship, a fish and poultry themed chess set cleverly calledCheckmeatand several vintage barware and glassware sets from the 1950s and 1960s.

"Food, like the game of chess, brings people together," says Shannon Bailey, chief curator at the WCHOF. "Moving away from a traditional museum method of displaying objects, the artifacts in this exhibition will be displayed in four immersive environments including a bar, a diner, a home area, and a fine dining restaurant, where visitors will get to see a variety of objects used as fun props as well as chess sets related to each theme."

Masterminds: Chess Prodigiesis an exhibition that tells the stories of notable chess phenoms including the iconic Bobby Fischer, World Chess Champion Magnus Carlsen and the legendary Polgar sisters. Through photographs, videos and mementos of important chess matches and tournaments from the collection of the WCHOF, visitors will learn more about these talented young players as well as their later accomplishments. The exhibition will also highlight the achievements of players who took up the game later in life and still made a mark on the world of chess.

More than 80 artifacts are on display, including a chess instructional book oncebelonging to and inscribed by Fischer as a youth, Carlsen's prestigious 2013 World Chess Championship trophy, and Carlsen's amber chess set that once belonged to former world chess champion Mikhail Tal.

Additionally, the exhibition highlights noteworthy accomplishments by a variety of chess prodigies such as Garry Kasparov (youngest world chess champion; 22 years of age), Hou Yifan (youngest women's chess champion; 16 years of age), and the Polgar sisters: Saint Louis resident Susan (top-ranked female player in 1984; 15 years of age), Sofia (won the Rome Open in 1989 with a performance rating of over 2900, one of the best results achieved by a female player; 14 years of age) and Judit (became the youngest ever grandmaster at that time, beating Bobby Fisher's record; 15 years of age).

"Unlike many other fields, in chess, kids can sometimes compete withand defeatadults," explains Allred. "Whether we're exploring the real-life story of Tanitoluwa (Tani) Adewumi, an eight-year-old Nigerian refugee who won the K-3 New York State Championship only a year after beginning to play the game, or fictional chess prodigy Beth Harmon from The Queen's Gambit, the genius behind these chess prodigies is truly awe-inspiring."

Pawns & PassportsandCheck, Please!will be on view through January 30, 2022, while Masterminds: Chess Prodigieswill end on November 7, 2021. For those unable to travel to Saint Louis, virtual tours of all exhibitions are available. To learn more about the exhibitions, visitwww.worldchesshof.org.

About the World Chess Hall of FameThe World Chess Hall of Fame (WCHOF) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization committed to building awareness of the cultural and artistic significance of chess. It opened on September 9, 2011, in the Central West End after moving from previous locations in New York, Washington, D.C., and Miami. Housed in a historic 15,900 square-foot residence-turned-business in Saint Louis' Central West End neighborhood, the WCHOF features World Chess Hall of Fame inductees, United States Chess Hall of Fame inductees selected by the U.S. Chess Trust, artifacts from the permanent collection and exhibitions highlighting the great players, historic games and rich cultural history of chess. The WCHOF partners with the Saint Louis Chess Club to provide innovative programming and outreach to local, national and international audiences.For more information, visitworldchesshof.org.

SOURCE World Chess Hall of Fame

https://worldchesshof.org

Read more:
New World Chess Hall of Fame Exhibitions Celebrate Chess Prodigies, Chess from Around the World and Food and Drink-Themed Sets - PRNewswire