Play from home

Is working from home the future of a productive society, or a fleeting aberration? Nobody knows yet, but a significant minority (at the very least) have found it viable, and even desirable. The shift in perception creates possibilities that weren’t there before.

Similarly, chess organisers are discovering a strong appetite for ‘play from home’ events, and I anticipate that we will see lots of new online tournament formats in the coming years. Last summer, Fide’s Online Olympiad was the first of its kind, and later in 2020 came the Online Olympiad for People with Disabilities, which I wrote about last week. February 2021 saw another new event — the Fide Online World Corporate Chess Championship. An astonishing 288 teams entered the event, including global companies like Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Gazprom. That kind of turnout strikes me as unimaginable for an over-the-board event of this nature. But online it was possible, with participants from timezones across the world. The event was hosted by chess.com, with England’s Alex Holowczak as the chief arbiter.

Teams of four were allowed to include one non-employee in their lineup, so there was a sprinkling of world-class grandmasters in the field. A few mismatched games were part of the point, as in the first round, Santosh Hassan Sampath, a financial controller at Oracle — was delighted to be paired against Magnus Carlsen. The eventual winners were Germany’s Grenke Bank, who have sponsored many high-profile chess events. In the final, they edged out Russia’s Sberbank, with Nepomniachtchi at the helm.

This was my favourite game from the event. Black, an international master representing an Indonesian port company, was the favourite in this game, but White won with a duo of beautiful sacrifices on e6 and d6.