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.
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