Apart from long-predicted progressive tightening of Covid-related restrictions, would-be organisers of over-the-board chess need to remember would-be entrants are not merely mutually agreeing to risk infecting each other, albeit with a relatively low risk if adequate precautions are rigidly imposed, they are also agreeing to risk becoming infected and then take the infection away with them and infect some third party in the outside world.

With the return of over-the-board chess receding over the horizon, we have to remember that beating Covid-19 is more important than keeping the o-t-b chess fires burning, and even more important than keeping organisations like the ECF afloat.

The Covid-19 pandemic has a lot in common with world war. Most chess competitions, apart from for correspondence chess, disappeared in this country during the Second World War, but resumed relatively as normal after a cessation of about six years, and such a cessation might well be what we have to assume might be the best course in the current pandemic, though with any luck the wait might be less than six years.

Balancing control of the virus against keeping some level of economic activity going is difficult and involves a degree of “try it and see”. (Failed efforts to reproduce Millikan’s oil-drop experiment come to mind.) Inevitably there will be changes in response to outcomes, sometimes foolishly termed “U-turns”. Over-the-board chess, however, is not a major driver of the UK economy, so a “better safe than sorry” policy is better than blindly delusional organisational zeal in striving for that elusive Holy Grail of the return of over-the-board chess.

Steve Mann