Coffee, LIFE and Insight
Reaching Out
How are you today? The 1st of August! How quickly time disappears when we are having fun, eh? For those of you who are growing tired of pulling the wings off of flies, here are some interesting numbers: there are exactly 153 days left before January 1, 2021; 21.857 weeks; 3,658 hours and 51 minutes.
Good news for all those sugar-caffeine-junkies out there! Coca-Cola said Friday that it will debut a new Coke with coffee drink in stores in the United States in January to broaden its beverage lineup.
All part of a strategy, no doubt, to pick up a few crumbs from the lucrative opioid epidemic that has left tens of thousands of American dead and millions more addicted in recent years.
While not quite original (Pepsi introduced such a drink last year), anything that ups the volume with more sugar and more caffeine will certainly be welcome by those Americans who have already given up on fighting obesity…God Bless Trump’s America!
Biel Chess Festival a Big Success!
Congratulations are in order for Polish gm Wojtaszek for winning this year’s Biel triathlon (mixed time controls) tournament. We can see him in the centre above, flanked by gms Harikrishna (right) and Adams (left) , who finished 2nd and 3rd respectively.
French grandmaster Christian Bauer won the Open-Masters tournament with an amazing 8 points from 9 games. Congrats!
As written earlier here on this blog, the Biel Chess Festival marks the return of high class chess events after the mandatory Covid-19 lockdown.
Europe has been able to witness the return of OTB (over the board) chess events in some of the EU member states. Good results in controlling the spread of the virus has given confidence that LIFE can slowly return to normal.
The Swiss tournament followed government regulations, and players were not required to use a mask.
Let’s hope that the rest of the world will soon be able to follow Europe’s example!
Dvorkovich, Sutovsky severely criticized
The Dvorkovich team running FIDE since the 2018 elections has come under increasing criticism in recent times. Failure after failure, deception after deception. Now that the Covid-19 has driven FIDE into full stop for the first time since WW2, everyone can see that FIDE simply does not exist or function normally anymore.
So many failures that the public is not even aware of how many of them have taken place : everyone who actually knows what kind of hell-hole FIDE has become is silenced by a non-disclosure agreement. Journalists are not allowed in to any of the meetings. No minutes are ever published.
As well, FIDE has no official channel of communication. Sutovsky’s personal FB account gives some information, but even this site gives more information that the official FIDE.COM website…you go figure it out!
Dvorkovich and Sutovsky have limited themselves to ignoring all of the criticism of their performance infront of FIDE. But this time they may find it a bit more difficult to just pretending that business is as usual.
Ilya Levitov, Russian oligarch, one time confidant of Dvorkovich when he was head of the RCF (Russian Chess Federation) and one of the most influential individuals in Russian chess has come out earlier this week with some comments that are scathing of Dvorkovich picking such an unskilled person as Sutovsky to be General Director of FIDE:
“He (Sutovsky) is a chess player. And that says it all. How does he even know about anything else in life, besides chess? He didn’t need to know this, he was engaged in chess. He had a 2700 rating, he performed brilliant attacks … But he was engaged in chess. How would he know about everything else? Why does a chess player work for us in an administrative position? I don’t understand. It’s a mystery to me. “