Daily Rome Shot 682

Photo by The Great Roman™

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Meanwhile,…

White to move.  Weave the net!

NB: I’ll hold comments with solutions ’till the next day so there won’t be “spoilers” for others.

Interested in learning?  Try THIS.

In news from chess.com… dig this!  This is about their stats for the month of February (a short month, btw.):

In total, there were an astonishing 1,057,320,754 games played on Chess.com. Of those, 576,946,832 were live games, of which 3,181,513 were daily games, and 480,373,922 were against the computer.

It works out as around 37.67 million games per day played in February. For comparison, that’s nearly 2.8 times the average number of games played per day in 2022, which was 13.53 million.

To put the numbers into context, there were a grand total of 16.83 billion games played here from September 2016 to February 2023. Unfortunately, Chess.com does not hold an accurate figure for the total amount of games played on the platform before 2016.

Records have been broken at regular intervals since the turn of the year. In fact, on December 31, the site hit 7,000,000 daily users for the first time. Within three weeks, that record had risen to 10,000,000.

This is an explosion.

The other day I was at the car dealership for the ride’s annual checkup and recall updates.  I had brought a travel set and a book with opening lines to work on while I waited.   Soon thereafter, one of the salesman – about 30 – approached and we chatted for bit.  He told me that he had just gotten into chess recently, that he had not played as a kid.  Then another worker there, younger, came by and said that he was just getting into chess and asked about the notation – “code” – in the book.  He sat down and I explained how it worked.  He asked for a game and we commenced.  What resulted was interesting.  After a few minutes some staff and the waiting customers were gathered at the table watch.

Shortly before, they had been all looking at their phones or at the big TV screen.  Suddenly, zero screens and 100% human interaction.

In itself, this is an argument in favor of learning to play and then going out and playing.