Not mine, of course, but the one in my home the air in my Parisian flat. Indeed, the sponsor of the second Champions Chess Tour tournament was the company Airthings, which specialises in air analysis. As a result, all the participants received a small box that allowed the commentators to give a...

As every year, the www.chess.com platform organised its Speed Chess Championship in November-December, and the big novelty in 2020 was obviously the return of Carlsen, after several years of absence. 16 players, knockout format, each match consisting of a duel of increasingly faster games: 90...

Magnus Carlsen always thinks big. After the Carlsen Tour born out of the pandemic, he and his associates have decided to go for it again with a new online circuit, the Champions Tour. This time it will be spread over almost a year and will consist of 10 tournaments in a unique nine-day format. The...

For me, the start of the new school year in September was marked by a succession of three tournaments. The first and the third would not deviate from what has become the new standard for the last six months, and were obviously held online. SAINT-LOUIS SHOWDOWN The Saint-Louis Showdown, from 11 to...

After my elimination in the preliminary phase of the Online Masters on 22 June, my summer horizon had suddenly widened considerably ï . I was able to alternate rest and training periods during the two months of July and August; of course, always aiming at the resumption of the Candidates...

Unfortunately, the Chessable Masters, third tournament of the online Carlsen Tour , didn’t end any better than the first one in which I had participated. Knocked out in the group phase, I had the confirmation that playing online at the same level as on the board was a real challenge for me ....

The American organizers were kind enough to invite me for their first Clutch Chess International , an 8-player knockout format in the form of 12 Rapid games (10 5) played over two days. The novelty of the clutch is to give an extra value to the last games of each playing session; games 5 and...

With the pandemic’s installation in the long term, the world of chess has gone online. Tournaments abound and the activity is more and more intense, for top players as well as for amateurs all over the world.In the last few weeks, I have had the opportunity to play two onlinecompetitions in a row,...

Like much of the world’s population, I found myself contained to my home due to the coronavirus directly after the Candidates’ tournament ended prematurely. The only world-class sports competition to resist the epidemic, the Candidates’ Tournament was the subject of a two-page report in the sports...

When I came back from a few days vacation in the U.S. early March, the world was still going around pretty much normally. The Charles de Gaulle airport I had just left was usually crowded. Of course, we knew that there was a significant risk of the coronavirus pandemic spreading, but nothing like...