It's not new nonsense, that's for sure: see for instance this piece from August 2016 (and indeed this one from April 2012) which I wrote after coming across a similar nonsense in the Financial Times, allowing Etan Ilfeld to repeat various implausible claims such as this.
Remarkably I am yet to come across the results from the Spanish league in the sports papers here. Perhaps I could catch them on breakfast television.
Mr Ilfeld has been operating this particular hoax for seven years now. Obviously its existence as a genuine, functioning sport is nil. As a genuine, functioning way of getting Mr Ilfeld's name in the media it has performed a little better: the notes to his Wikipedia entry list the Telegraph and Toronto Star among the marks, along with Chess Life and the Financial Times as above.
Also Chessbase, who have always been prepared to write up any old rubbish, and scrolling down their 2016 piece I was delighted to find an old friend
from the similar chessboxing hoax.
As it goes the last time I came across Mike Bushell, the presenter of our nonsense, it was promoting the chessboxing swindle almost ten years ago. So that's a decade of promoting charlatans and chancers.
No, it's not the most important thing in the world. But it's not totally harmless either, pretending that these very unreal sports are actually real. At the very least it means you're promoting the charlatans and the chancers on their own terms. How clever, how harmless, is that?
It would make an amusing competition though, to come up with the stupidest crossover possible involving chess which can be accepted as column filler for the media.
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