Shogi and Covid19
Dear community, I was wondering about how the covid19 pandemic has affected shogi activities around the world.
Watching some pro games, I notice the use of mask is now an obligation to play, I also checked on some news about the safety measures taken on dojos in Japan... In your countries, what are you doing?
Doki-Doki, the large annual Japanese culture event in Manchester has been cancelled. This would have included Shogi and Go demonstrations. I've assisted at the demonstrations for the previous 3 years and was really looking forward to the 'Thunder Drummers'. Damn!
I'm 99% sure a similar event in Liverpool earlier in the year was also cancelled.
One unfortunate (hopefully infrequent) side-effect I saw was the trashing of an event being organised in London by a small group of Shogi enthusiasts by an ignorant or malicious poster (not on this forum). This idiot (thousands of miles away) questioned whether they were applying sufficiently stringent anti-virus precautions. They were, and the details were linked to **FROM THE EVENT WEB PAGE**. but this brain-dead cretin couldn't be arsed to check before posting his spoiler. Not very helpful during these rather difficult times!
During summer, we have replaced our physical sessions by online sessions on 81dojo combined with a discord server to chat and comment the games.
We will reopen the club this week for physical sessions, adding up of course some sanitary regulations that are anyway mandatory currently in France :
- wearing masks
- washing hands / using hydro gel
- keeping distance between boards
- washing the shogi sets after every session.
These are actually more or less following the recommendations published by the french chess federation.
>>1 toebbens
I think the same about the risk while driving to the meeting. The situation is complex around the world, thanks for sharing.
Our local meeting in Berlin got restarted about 2 month ago, in June; that was when in Germany the first wave had been quenched and the ban on even small meetings was lifted. We then installed a protective protocol consisting of the usual contact list of attendants, use of face masks, and hand disinfection. For the latter, we have small bottles of disinfectant next to each board, so each player can use it before and after the game.
We did not install any more serious measures. Some could be done, but would feel too invasive, like temperature measurement or obligatory use of the governments warning app. Others would destroy the atmosphere of getting together for a game, like playing on two boards while calling out the moves. And yes, this has indeed been proposed. I feel that if the situation is so bad that we would need such measures, the real danger would be from using the subway to drive to meeting.
Larger tournaments, on a regional of national scale, are still out, though.