In the end it may have been Nick Smiths penchant for putting Nick first that sealed his fate.

The factions have been moving and sounding out possible votes to challenge Judith and Nick was always up for grabs. Replacing him with Harete Hipango looks like a win for Judith because Hipango is a Collins cheerleader, but ultimately it could prove disastrous because Hipangos fundamentalist Christianity would serve Luxon and the Lamb over Crusher.

National have no policy and no way to combat the solidarity that the unique universal experience of Covid has created, all they have is fear and resentment.

Unfortunately those are the two most powerful forces in politics.

The segregation and separatism stuff was too ham fisted but the teaching white privilege and free speech for gender critical feminists is culture war dynamite.

Fight the culture war in a way that gets cut through or generate real policies. Those are the two choices for Judith this is her last reshuffle of the Chess Board before her own Caucus checkmate her.

Judith needs to be less Crusher and more Defender.

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Judith's last shuffle of the Chess board - thedailyblog.co.nz

The 2021 Grand Chess Tour is ready to kick off

Press Release

The Grand Chess Tour (GCT) has confirmed new players in the field for the upcoming Superbet Chess Classic in Bucharest, Romania and Paris Rapid & Blitz tournament.

Hungarian Grandmaster Richard Rapport has been confirmed as a full tour player to replace Grandmaster Ding Liren from China and Russian Grandmaster Ian Nepomniachtchi will become a wildcard player for specific Grand Chess Tour events as he prepares for the World Championship title match later this year. The Superbet Chess Classic will now include a wildcard player, Romanian Grandmaster Constantin Lupulescu. The Superbet Chess Classic is sponsored by Superbet Foundation and will feature a 10 player round-robin battle for a total of $325,000 in prize money.

Continually looking for new ways to innovate, the GCT selected split wildcards for Paris. Former World Champion Vladimir Kramnik will compete in the blitz portion while French Grandmaster Etienne Bacrot will team up with Kramnik to represent the duo in the rapid phase of the tournament. Their combined score will be used to determine final standings. Three additional wildcards will round out the field for the Paris Rapid & Blitz leg. These wildcards include World Champion Challenger, Grandmaster Ian Nepomniachtchi, Grandmaster Alireza Firouzja, and Grandmaster Peter Svidler. The Paris Rapid & Blitz tournament is sponsored by Vivendi, Colliers, and Kasparov Chess and will include 9 rounds of rapid chess and 18 rounds of blitz chess for a total prize fund of $150,000.

"Although COVID-19 has continued to impact the chess community, we are pleased that this years tour will continue as planned with our five over the board tournaments," said GCT Executive Director, Michael Khodarkovsky. "Fans will certainly enjoy watching legends like Vladimir Kramnik square off against a new generation of young top players like Alireza Firouzja and Richard Rapport."

Additionally, International Arbiter David Sedgwick from England has been reappointed as the GCT Chief Arbiter for 2021.

The field for the two upcoming international events are finalized and are as follows:

#

Player Name

Player Type

Country

FIDE Rating

URS Rating

1

Caruana, Fabiano

Full Tour Player

USA

2820

2800

2

Aronian, Levon

Full Tour Player

ARM

2781

2784

3

Giri, Anish

Full Tour Player

NED

2780

2769

4

Grischuk, Alexander

Full Tour Player

RUS

2776

2785

5

So, Wesley

Full Tour Player

USA

2770

2792

6

Mamedyarov, Shakhriyar

Full Tour Player

AZE

2770

2771

7

Radjabov, Teimour

Full Tour Player

AZE

2765

2770

8

Vachier-Lagrave, Maxime

Full Tour Player

FRA

2760

2799

9

Rapport, Richard

Full Tour Player

HUN

2763

2748

10

Lupulescu, Constantin

Wildcard

ROU

2656

2652

#

Player Name

Player Type

Country

FIDE Rating

URS Rating

1

Caruana, Fabiano

Full Tour Player

USA

2820

2800

2

Aronian, Levon

Full Tour Player

ARM

2781

2784

3

So, Wesley

Full Tour Player

USA

2770

2792

4

Radjabov, Teimour

The rest is here:
The Grand Chess Tour 2021 begins - with tournaments in Bukarest and Paris - Chessbase News

Credit: Pixabay.

Researchers in Australia taught children to play chess and found that a year later their aversion to risk decreased significantly. And not just any kind of risks either: the children become better at avoiding risks that rarely result in positive outcomes and plow through risks that were likely to result in a positive outcome.

Things of value in life typically involve risk, whether its quitting your job to follow your passion or overcoming your fear of rejection when approaching a person you find attractive. But not all risks are equal and not everything risky has the potential to enrich our lives. On the contrary, there are some risks that are just stupid to take, such as gambling knowing the odds are stacked against you.

One could argue that the most successful people across the board are those who knew which risks were worth pursuing at the right time. Chess may be a great way to train this ability to perform cost-benefit analyses, according to a new study published by researchers from Monash University and Deakin University.

The researchers recruited 400 school children from the UK, 15 to 16 years old, who had never played chess before. After they were trained to play, the children had their cognitive abilities assessed over the course of a year.

According to the results, the children experienced a decrease in risk aversion, scored better at math, and improved in logic and rational thinking skills.

The researchers in Australia mention that chess is ideal for demonstrating the fine line between good and poor risk-taking. Sometimes sacrificing your knight or performing some other gambit can bait your adversary into a trap that quickly ends in checkmate. In other scenarios, sacrificing pieces on the board can be extremely detrimental and this becomes painfully evident the more you play.

Furthermore, the skills learned from chess in terms of risk assessment and decreased risk-aversion (for the good risks) were long-lasting. Most of the children had lowered risk aversion a full year after the end of the participation in the study.

Our main finding is that chess training reduces the level of risk aversion almost a year after the intervention ended. We do not find any evidence of significant effects of chess training on other academic outcomes, creativity, and attention/focus, wrote the authors of the new study.

The findings appeared in the Journal of Development Economics.

See more here:
Teaching children to play chess makes them more confident taking calculated risks - ZME Science

Ratings Gap

For each year between 19722000, the average USCF rating of the overall U.S. Championship was always more than 300 points greater than the average rating of the U.S. Womens Championship.

Although the rating differences are already apparent, Ashley Yan conducted an independent samples t-test to compare the means. The results confirmed a statistically significant difference between the average ratings of overall U.S. Championship participants and U.S. Womens Championship participants. Since the resulting p-value was much less than 0.05, which is the standard threshold for statistical significance, its highly likely that the average rating differences are influenced by an external factor.

Given these results, one might conclude that there is a significant difference in skill between men and women. But other explanations are possible.

Participation Hypothesis

We hypothesize that the difference in ratings between the U.S. Womens Championship and the overall U.S. Championship is expected due to the small numbers of girls and women with USCF memberships. This conclusion remains valid under two assumptions: that women made up 5% of the total USCF membership, and the rating distribution for all female USCF members was relatively the same as the rating distribution for all male USCF members.

Due to the lack of data available to us, the exact percentage of female USCF members between 19722000 remains unknown, and the rating distributions based on gender are also unknown. Given that 5% of USCF players were girls or women in April 2000, as mentioned in part one, one might speculate that the percentage was even lower in the years before 2000. Indeed, for the datapoint of 1993, the percentage was lower (4.65%). Further data points may or may not be available from the US Chess. Requesting a data search would require staff hours and thus an outside funding source to pay for US Chess staff time.

If a funded study were conducted, and data points of girls/women in various years from 1972 to 1993 were uncovered (since we already have the 1993 and 2000 data points), these additional data points might demonstrate a substantial participation gap between men and women.

In addition, assuming the rating distributions for men and women were relatively equal, it is expected that the highest ratings for men would be higher than those for women. More specifically, when comparing two distributions with the same average value and variability, the distribution with the larger sample size will logically have greater representation on both ends of the distribution curve.

Extreme Values

When this logic is applied to the U.S. Championships rating differences, the difference between the average ratings of the overall and womens championships would be expected due to a smaller sample size of total female USCF members. The participants in both championships have ratings in the top percentile for their corresponding gender, so the championships ratings are the highest or most extreme values in the rating distributions of all USCF players. Since there are substantially more male USCF players than female, the male USCF player distribution would not only have a greater magnitude of players in the top percentile, but the highest ratings would also be greater than those for female USCF players. Extreme values explain why the participants in the overall U.S. Championships generally have much higher ratings than those in the U.S. Womens Championships.

Chess Life magazine, March 1996 (from theChess Life and Chess Review Archives)

Graphs and Conclusion

Based on the graph illustrating the average ratings of the U.S. Championships and U.S. Womens Championships, the rating difference has generally decreased over 19722000. Due to the proportion of female USCF members possibly increasing over this period, this trend is statistically expected: The extreme values of the two distributions become more similar as the distributions size difference decreases. That the proportion of female USCF members increased between 19722000, though, is another assumption we make as we do not currently have much gender-based data for those years.

We conclude that the gender participation gap influences the average rating differences between the U.S. Championship players and the U.S. Womens Championship players, and, therefore, the difference would be expected. However, our conclusions and the insight we can draw from the given data are limited. There may or may not be available rating distributions from 19722000, and overall USCF membership during those years perhaps did not include sufficiently accurate gender coding.

Future Research

In 2001, there was no womens tournament. In 2004, there was a seven-player U.S. Womens Championship but no corresponding U.S. Championship. That is, the 2004 U.S. Championship was named the 2005 championship for legal reasons and was a mixed-gender Swiss system. In 2002 (56 players), 2003 (58 players), 2005 (64 players), and 2006 (two 32-player Swiss systems), the women and men played in combined U.S. championships.

The comparison chart found in part one could resume in 2007, with the caution that, for several of those years, the U.S. championships averages would be depressed due to large numbers of players competing in the U.S. Championships.

Starting in 2014, both the U.S. Womens Championship and the U.S. Championship were round robins of smaller sizes. Comparisons would again be possible, as they were for 19722000, the focus of this two-part series. A future article could analyze those more recent years, 20142020, when the percentage of US Chess female members is above 10%, to see if the rating gap is closing between the U.S. Womens and the U.S. Championship fields. Also possible is a second historical article, about the years 1950 to 1972 and the average ratings for those years for the U.S. Womens and U.S. Championships.

The ratings gap and gender: Analyzing U.S. Chess Championships (Part I)

Read the rest here:
The ratings gap and gender: Analyzing U.S. Chess Championships (Part II) - Chessbase News

Chess Market research report is the new statistical data source added by A2Z Market Research.

Chess Market is growing at a High CAGR during the forecast period 2021-2027. The increasing interest of the individuals in this industry is that the major reason for the expansion of this market.

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Top Key Players Profiled in this report are:

The House of Staunton, ChessSUA, CNCHESS, ChessBaron, Shri Ganesh (India) International, Chessncrafts, Chessbazaar.com, Official Staunton, ABC-CHESS.com, Yiwu Linsai.

The key questions answered in this report:

Various factors are responsible for the markets growth trajectory, which are studied at length in the report. In addition, the report lists down the restraints that are posing threat to the global Chess market. It also gauges the bargaining power of suppliers and buyers, threat from new entrants and product substitute, and the degree of competition prevailing in the market. The influence of the latest government guidelines is also analyzed in detail in the report. It studies the Chess markets trajectory between forecast periods.

Global Chess Market Segmentation:

Market Segmentation: By Type

Wooden Chess, Glass Chess, Plastic Chess

Market Segmentation: By Application

Indoor Sports, Indoor Entertainment, Others

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Regions Covered in the Global Chess Market Report 2021: The Middle East and Africa (GCC Countries and Egypt) North America (the United States, Mexico, and Canada) South America (Brazil etc.) Europe (Turkey, Germany, Russia UK, Italy, France, etc.) Asia-Pacific (Vietnam, China, Malaysia, Japan, Philippines, Korea, Thailand, India, Indonesia, and Australia)

The cost analysis of the Global Chess Market has been performed while keeping in view manufacturing expenses, labor cost, and raw materials and their market concentration rate, suppliers, and price trend. Other factors such as Supply chain, downstream buyers, and sourcing strategy have been assessed to provide a complete and in-depth view of the market. Buyers of the report will also be exposed to a study on market positioning with factors such as target client, brand strategy, and price strategy taken into consideration.

The report provides insights on the following pointers:

Market Penetration: Comprehensive information on the product portfolios of the top players in the Chess market.

Product Development/Innovation: Detailed insights on the upcoming technologies, R&D activities, and product launches in the market.

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Market Development: Comprehensive information about emerging markets. This report analyzes the market for various segments across geographies.

Market Diversification: Exhaustive information about new products, untapped geographies, recent developments, and investments in the Chess market.

Table of Contents

Global Chess Market Research Report 2021 2027

Chapter 1 Chess Market Overview

Chapter 2 Global Economic Impact on Industry

Chapter 3 Global Market Competition by Manufacturers

Chapter 4 Global Production, Revenue (Value) by Region

Chapter 5 Global Supply (Production), Consumption, Export, Import by Regions

Chapter 6 Global Production, Revenue (Value), Price Trend by Type

Chapter 7 Global Market Analysis by Application

Chapter 8 Manufacturing Cost Analysis

Chapter 9 Industrial Chain, Sourcing Strategy and Downstream Buyers

Chapter 10 Marketing Strategy Analysis, Distributors/Traders

Chapter 11 Market Effect Factors Analysis

Chapter 12 Global Chess Market Forecast

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