€29.90
Hybrid Chess: Feedback from the players
How did it feel to play hybrid chess? Okay was the most frequent answer on the Mitropacup questionnaire.
When Julia Novkovic realized that her opponent could checkmate her, something even more shocking happened. On the way to delivering checkmate on h7, the screen showed her opponent’s queen stopping a square short on h6. This didn’t only blunder the queen but also a checkmate on her own king. After the game, the Austrian player shared on Facebook her shame to have won in such a way after she had been outplayed fair and square. The least she could do now was to suggest that the game won’t be rated. Novkovic suggested that in a clearer state of mind she would have resigned after realizing that her opponent had mouse-sliped.
€29.90
Hybrid chess is not a fundamentally new invention. When Bobby Fischer was not allowed to travel to Cuba in 1965, he instead made his moves at the New York Marshall Chess Club, which were then telegraphed to Havana. The radio tournament of 1945 featured arbiters overseeing Soviet and American teams, as well. Of course, back in the day there were no computers that would have been able to provide players with useful tips.
And this is not the only thing that is different nowadays. Due to Covid-19, numerous countries do not currently allow two people from different households to sit at a distance of less than six feet from each other for several hours. In hybrid chess, the players are not in the same room. Instead, each one of them has their own chess workplace. The arbiters can oversee all moves and time limits on their computer, while also being able to ensure that neither of the players are running other software parallel to the game platform and video c