Stay tuned for new research on cheating and its various impacts on chess. Meet pioneers of chess software. Get to know the developers of the next generation of chess apps. Some of them will feature in our stories during the next weeks.
The programme is announced on a new website with its usual mix of keynote speeches, workshops, debates and interviews. Practitioners, decision-makers and researchers from around the globe will share their knowledge. Platforms and producers will exhibit their latest developments. The conference will use a mix of platforms to boost learning, interaction and networking.
The conference series came to life in 2013 as part of the London Chess Classic with a focus on chess for education, with the 2014 edition highlighting “Chess and Mathematics” and 2016 “The Didactics of Chess”. While initially run by Chess in Schools and Communities (CSC), ChessPlus has taken over the organisation, and in spite of changing the brand name to ChessTech 2020 the topic is still there. A high-powered Chess in Education group, that FIDE and the ECU have jointly created, will present its first results. So will 8by8, an Erasmus Plus project that brings strategy games into primary schools.
This year the London Chess Classic has regrettably had to be canceled due to the pandemic (it will come back with a summer edition in 2021). This time the conference is embedded in a different context. It takes place in parallel with the first online edition of the annual FIDE Congress. Delegates, Council and commission members will be encouraged to follow the conference. FIDE is contributing to the budget through a continental ECU grant.
The partnership between the conference and ChessTech is hardly a surprise when you consider the personal overlap: The Conference Director John Foley is also director of ChessPlus Ltd that manages ChessTech. Our editor Stefan Löffler was the first Director of the London Chess Conference when it was founded in 2013 and now functions as its Programme Director. Our other editor Conrad Schormann joins this year’s conference in the role of Media Director. In the run-up ChessTech is picking up its webinars again. On 3 November with a debate: “What Future for Professional Chess?”