Chess predictions for 2022

Here are my chess related predictions for 2022 (take all with a grain of salt, as my predictive record not perfect):

1. Vlad Drkulec will continue to be president of the CFC after the 2022 CFC AGM;
2. Judit Polgar will come out of her chess playing retirement before 2022 ends;
3. Garry Kasparov will be free to safely play chess globally, as well as to return safely to Russia, before 2022 ends (see my 2022 non-chess predictions in CFC Discussion Board's Off-Topic Forum);
4. Canadian GM Kevin Spraggett will shut down his blog before 2022 ends;
5. At the least one chess variant will rival standard chess globally, in terms of play on the internet, before 2022 ends.

5. At the least one chess variant will rival standard chess globally, in terms of play on the internet, before 2022 ends.

Regarding Xiangqi (Chinese Chess), no doubt the most popular chess variant still (meaning other than standard chess), the following old link puts the number of people playing worldwide at 100 million (chessvariants.com suggests double that, in an old article there) - that's circa 2011 - however at least some kibitzers elsewhere believe Xiangqi must be more popular than chess, since it's so popular in China; also, someone, in the wiki talk archive link that follows, asked there why there was no list of Xiangqi servers available. Meanwhile, recall that FIDE put a figure of 605 million adults playing chess, a few years back:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3..._in_the_world?

https://www.chessvariants.com/page/MLchinese-chess

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiangqi

Note that currently the most popular game played on chessvariants.com's Game Courier is shogi (Japanese Chess), although the sample size is relatively small (e.g. only several hundred games of shogi played so far); one other link has one poster estimating about 10 million Japanese play shogi (the bulk of shogi players in the world!?):

https://www.chessvariants.com/play/pbm/listgames.php

https://www.quora.com/How-popular-is...adays-in-Japan

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shogi

Note that chessvariants.com is probably the world's leading chess variant website, for sheer number of variants and capabilities for inventing and submitting them to be played (possibly).

The following FICS server stats show that variants were played 1.76% of the time since 1999 (a healthy chunk being bughouse or crazyhouse); however, I noticed the percentage started going sharply down after 2017:

https://www.ficsgames.org/stats.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bughouse_chess

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crazyhouse

Here's wikipedia's list of notable chess servers (includes 12 that are not listed as defunct):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o..._chess_servers

The following link mentions at least 4 English text Chinese Chess 'servers' (one being the relatively slow email-system-using chess variants.com, which also allows the play of standard chess) - probably more are Chinese text servers, (but no count of their quantity is offered that I could see):

https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-be...-chess-Xiangqi

The following link contains mention of at least 6 shogi servers:

http://shogi.pl/faq/

Some probabilities to Kevin's predictions:

1. 99%
2. 5%
3. Less than 1%
4. No comments
5. 5%

Regarding K.S. shutting down his blog, it relates to my 2022 non-chess prediction on the Off-Topic forum that there may be divine intervention in a big way next year. If that happens, I'm guessing K.S. will see the light in good time, and realize his blog not being so kosher is not a good thing. A weakness of my own is that I used to visit it about once a week. Nigel Short commented once when in Ottawa that he thought K.S's blog was funny, fwiw.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Kevin Pacey

Here are my chess related predictions for 2022 (take all with a grain of salt, as my predictive record not perfect):

1. Vlad Drkulec will continue to be president of the CFC after the 2022 CFC AGM;
2. Judit Polgar will come out of her chess playing retirement before 2022 ends;
3. Garry Kasparov will be free to safely play chess globally, as well as to return safely to Russia, before 2022 ends (see my 2022 non-chess predictions in CFC Discussion Board's Off-Topic Forum);
4. Canadian GM Kevin Spraggett will shut down his blog before 2022 ends;
5. At the least one chess variant will rival standard chess globally, in terms of play on the internet, before 2022 ends.

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My chess related prediction #1 for 2022 turned out to prove true. Prediction #4 sort of, since K.S.'s 'blog' has moved elsewhere (Facebook, I seem to recall from this Forum). Meanwhile, I'm not sure how close prediction #5 came - 'Duck Chess', invented 2016, has become quite popular on the internet - the link below claims it went viral:

https://duckchess.com/

Since the rest of my wildest predictions (#2 and #3) failed miserably, I thought I'd post a chess related poll instead of just my own predictions for this coming year (2023), to let respondents do their own predictions about organized chess in Canada:

https://www.chesscanada.info/forum/s...onally-in-2023