Interesting item from yesterday’s Chicago Tribune regarding the rise of online poker in Russia over recent years, the main thrust of which concerns the way poker has now more or less overtaken chess as the national game, at least in the view of certain observers.
The article’s title, “Online poker’s killing the Russian chess star,” kind of awkwardly reprises that of the Buggles’ prescient 1980 pop hit “Video Killed the Radio Star,” the effort to do so probably misplacing the article’s emphasis somewhat.
The article does include some generalized nostalgia about the Soviet era’s chess “celebrities” -- people like Garry Kasparov and Anatoly Karpov (neither of whom is actually named in the article).