A homage to Alice in Wonderland and Alice through the Looking Glass.

Much of my professional career in chess has been involved with organising world chess championships in London: namely, those of 1986, between Garry Kasparov and Anatoly Karpov, 1993, which saw Britain’s Nigel Short fail in his challenge to Kasparov, and 2000, when Vladimir Kramnik finally terminated Kasparov’s 15-year reign as champion. As a corollary, hoc opus hic labor est, I fought to get chess covered on television, convinced that if snooker could make it, so could chess.

I would never have believed it possible that the current and increasing statistics for viewing chess via online TV could have become so staggeringly successful.

One advantage chess has over snooker is that viewers can actually play online, as well as watch.

An up-to-the-minute press release from Chess.com indicates the dramatic extent of this media triumph for our game.

“Chess.com has announced a ground-breaking new partnership with Wurl, the leader in data-driven solutions for CTV, to deliver its Chess TV FAST channel to new streaming platforms.

For the first time, elite events such as the Champions Chess Tour, Chess.com Global Chess Championship, the Speed Chess Championship and the World Chess Championship will be aired across the Chess TV FAST footprint. In addition to the live broadcasts, Chess TV will include original chess programmes such as Street Chess, which examines the chess scene in select cities, and existing series featuring legendary players such as Magnus Carlsen, Hikaru Nakamura, Fabiano Caruana and Anish Giri.Chess.com CEO Erik Allebest said: The Chess.com community is growing every single day. Chess has gone mainstream, and its interest on a global scale is at an all-time high. We have a powerful chess platform that will help drive Chess TV into the FAST space, and we’re looking forward to working with Wurl to make that happen. Through Wurl’s Global FAST Pass solution, Chess TV will be marketed to streamers worldwide. Global FAST Pass is the world’s largest Free Ad-supported Streaming TV (FAST) channel network, reaching more than 300 million viewers in 195 countries across 38 streamer brands.”

In May 2023, Chess.com membership soared past 140 million worldwide, which represents a 355% increase since January 2020, with 150,000 new users being registered each day. The site also had more than 57 million monthly active users playing 840 million games during the month, up 550% since January 2020. Chess.com is the 114th world-ranked site on the internet, while in June 2023, Chess.com was named one of TIME’s 100 Most Influential Companies.

I must admit to never having heard of FAST or Wurl, before I received this gushing press release. Living, as I do, as a dinosaur remnant from the Cretaceous period in my ivory cave, resorting to wielding my goose quill pen, occasionally dipped in venom (with apologies to Waldo Lydecker from the film Laura), I can hardly expect to be au courant with the latest communications technology. Now I know better.

While on the topic of impossible things: of my impossible list, some things are more impossible than others.

Alice laughed: “There’s no use trying; one can’t believe impossible things.”

“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

This is from Lewis Carroll’s chess-based fantasy Alice through the Looking Glass. I have gone into Stakhanovite overdrive and doubled the regulation six impossible things, as prescribed by the Red Chess Queen, to be believed before breakfast.

Here is my list of twelve impossible things in which I have succeeded in believing.

Keir Starmer will return as PM.

All official sporting bodies will restrict entry to females born as such.

Effective action will be taken against disruption by Greenpeace, Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion.

The Government will stop illegal immigration.

The fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square will be occupied by a statue of our late Queen.

Proper redress will be given to the victims of the Post Office scandal and those responsible will be punished.including Ed Davey of the Lib Dem’s under whose aegis the post office scandal occurred.

Kemi Badenoch and the Praetorian Guard of the Tory Party will understand why they lost the last election

Peter Mandelson will go to jail

More severe penalties will be introduced against terrorists, child murderers and those who kill police officers.

The UK government will cease giving foreign aid to nuclear powers.

Russia will lose in Ukraine and withdraw from its occupied territories, including Crimea.

Nigel Farage of Reform will stop accepting dodgy donations from known criminals

And as a bonus to my golden dozen, the leadership of the Church of England will be converted to Christianity and start to believe in God.