GM Kevin Spraggett
continues to lament the fact that the “Main Street Media” does not give the Royal Game decent coverage.
“With two World Championships going on as well as a number of elite tournaments, you would think that there would be a good chance of getting some pretty decent chess coverage in MSM.
Think again. MSM is generally wary of chess and more often than not reports on it only if someone was murdered, kidnapped by aliens or when the MSM can put a useable spin on it.”
http://www.spraggettonchess.com/friday-coffee-21/
The question that should be asked is, “Why should the MSM give any coverage to Chess?” As I have written previously the general public tuned out and turned off Chess when World Human Chess Champion Garry Kasparov
Kasparov showing the blues after losing to Deep Blue
took a dive when losing to the IBM computer program known as Deep Blue. After that debacle of one small step for man and one giant leap for machine all of the news made by the Chess world continued to be negative. The president of the world Chess organization FIDE, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov,
Vladimir Putin with minion Kirsan Ilyumzhinov
was a one man wrecking crew of negative publicity for Chess for DECADES. The fact that Chess garners any publicity at all from the MSM is remarkable.
You do not get any more main stream than the media giant known as the New York Times. From todaze article:
Checkmate or Stalemate? Carlsen and Caruana Draw Again
By Victor Mather
Nov. 19, 2018
“Like tick-tack-toe, five-day cricket matches and Italian soccer in the 1980s, chess has a lot of draws. But the two grandmasters currently battling for the world title in London, Magnus Carlsen and Fabiano Caruana, may be taking it a little too far.
Eight of the 12 games in their world championship match are over. And every one of them, including Monday’s Game 8, has ended in a draw.”
That was how the article began. This is how it ends:
“Ah, yes, the tiebreaker. Monday’s draw leaves four games to go in this year’s match. If no one wins any of them, the players will begin an arduous run of tiebreakers on Nov. 28 in the hopes that someone will actually win a game.
First, the players will face off in four games with a rapid time limit of only 25 minutes per player.
Four more draws? They will next play up to 10 more games at the blinding pace of only five minutes per player — so-called blitz games.
Still drawing? It’s time for an Armageddon game. In it, Carlsen and Caruana would play a single game: Whoever draws white — and goes first — will get five minutes, while black will get four.
If this game, too, is a draw, then the organizers will simply throw up their hands and declare black the winner of the match.
Really.”
Listen up, Chess pooh-bahs! This writer concurs with what I have written for many years. He is laughing at Chess because he knows what a JOKE is the way a CHAMPIONSHIP has been and continues to be determined. REALLY!
Armchair Warrior 
I couldn’t agree more. It’s even sillier than deciding a World Cup on penalty kicks. Penalty kicks are a small part of soccer, though the probability of a score is high when they occur. But the result of a match going to penalty kicks is fairly balanced. In chess, aside from settling a classical championships by trying to force them to play poorly enough that someone might win a game, it’s almost always going to be a situation where one player is legitimately better than the other at blitz. The weaker blitz player thus has a handicap, one which at that level is pretty significant. That’s blatantly unfair. So the system is both silly and unfair.