CCI Biennial Meeting Lectures in St. Louis In Person and Online!

Hola! Received an email from Tom Gallegos of Chess Collectors International with an update on the arrangements made for the re-established CCI Biennial Meeting coming up soon in St. Louis.

Dear CCI Members and Friends,

We hereby announce that CCI’s 19 ^th Biennial will be what is called a “hybrid” event – part in-person, and part online.  We cordially invite you to attend, from the comfort of your own home.

PLEASE ATTEND OUR SCHEDULED WEBINARS, 9 am to noon, CDT, September 3 and 4, 2020.

It breaks our hearts that so many of our friends and fellow collectors cannot be with us in St. Louis for our meeting in September.  We’d been hoping to welcome as many as 60-80 of you on the originally scheduled date, back in May.  Now, with our September postponement date just around the corner, and the pandemic grinding on and on, it looks like the actual number of attendees will be much closer to 10.  (And we need every last one of these folks!)

With this in mind, we have decided to share as much of the conference as possible with the rest of you.  We know the morning lecture series is only part of the overall conference, but it's an important part.  These lectures, at least, can be broadcast as Zoom webinars.  Most of the lectures will also appear in our printed program (currently over 100 pages, and counting) which will be available to non-attendees shortly after the conference.  For a small donation to the club to cover costs, of course.

A few days to a week before the conference, you will receive a Webinar invite from our Zoom account.  This is not spam, though some of you may find it in your spam folders.  To register, please click on the link you will find in that invitation.  You will have complete flexibility to attend as much or as little of the talks as you wish.  The talks will hopefully also be recorded, so as to be available for posterity, just like the printed versions. They will be posted, either on our new CCI website, or possibly on YouTube.

We have a wonderful group of talks scheduled.  You will hear a great deal about the relationship between chess and pandemics; the French Enlightenment as it relates to chess history, and John McCrary of the USCF will speak about the evolution of chess rules.  We will even have Dr. George Dean presenting some of his 18 ^th century sets; and Allan Savage to enlighten us about Thomas Jefferson as a chess player, both of them speaking to you remotely.  We will also squeeze in a short business meeting on Friday.  Our latest revised schedule is as follows:

Thursday, September 3rd

09:00 – 09:15  CONFERENCE WELCOME – Tom Gallegos & Luann Woneis
09:15 – 10:15  HOW TO CHECKMATE A VIRUS (Keynote Address) – Luann Woneis
10:15 – 10:30  Fresh air break, and coffee
00:30 – 11:30  ENLIGHTENMENT – Tom Gallegos
11:30 – 12:00  CHESS MASTERWORKS OF THE 18 ^th CENTURY – Dr. George Dean

Friday, September 4th

09:00 – 10:00  THE EVOLUTION OF CHESS RULES – John McCrary
10:00 – 10:15  Fresh air break, and coffee
10:15 – 10:45  JEFFERSON AS A CHESS PLAYER – Allan Savage (online)
10:45 – 11:15  CAISSA, A POEM – Read by Tom Gallegos
11:15 – 12:00  CCI BUSINESS MEETING – Tom Gallegos & Gordon Clapp

Our timeframe for these talks is an estimate.  We will endeavor to stay on schedule, but you may find one or more sessions do not begin or end exactly on time, depending on what is happening in the room.  There will be a Q&A button for you to ask questions at the end of each speech.  The speaker will repeat your typed question, and will normally answer it verbally.

This means we will be scheduling TWO SEPARATE, 3-HOUR WEBINARS.  One for each morning, starting at 9 am.  However, you should only need to register one time, for both.  You may then attend as much or as little of the talks as you desire.

This is CENTRAL DAYLIGHT TIME.  If you are in another part of the country, please adjust for your time zone.  If you are in the UK, the talks will begin at 15:00 (3 pm) your time.  Most of the Continent of Europe will find the talks beginning at 16:00 (4 pm).

There is no cost to register and attend these two webinars.  If you have a reasonably up-to-date computer and an internet connection, you should be able to attend.

I’m afraid with only Luann and I running the system while also speaking, there will not be a tech support person to help if you have system issues either morning, but we will record these talks and post them later for those of you who are interested, but cannot attend the live version for whatever reason.

Luann and I have been taking a crash course in how to host webinars on Zoom, so our skills are still somewhat fresh, but we really think we can do this.  We hope the webinars will allow everyone to participate in our conference, at least to some extent.

The CHESS AUCTION at Link Auction Galleries is scheduled to take place the next day, at 10:00 am on Saturday, September 5 ^th.  That’s 16:00 (4 pm) for the UK; and 17:00 (5 pm) for most of the rest of Europe.  You will find it online at Link Auction Galleries.

The auction is one more segment of the conference that you can enjoy from the comfort of your own home.  Link has 267 lots of chess sets and other chess items ready to go.  Get ready to bid!

And ... "SEE" you in Saint Louis!

Best Regards,

Tom Gallegos and Louann Woneis
Organizers

Chess Collectors International Biennial Congress in St. Louis Postponed to September 2020

Here is the communique in full, received this evening:

Dear CCI Members, and other Chess Friends,

It has been a difficult decision, but with Coronavirus-related closures and travel restrictions worsening by the day, I'm afraid we must bow to the inevitable, and postpone CCI's 19th Biennial Congress (currently scheduled for May 27-31) until September 2-6, 2020.

This new date is provisional, of course.  If the pandemic is not over by that time, obviously we might have to postpone it further, or even cancel it altogether.  We should know more as events continue to unfold over the spring and summer.  But this new date has several advantages.  It is Labor Day weekend here in the States (Labor Day itself is actually on the 7th), a holiday that should help boost our USA attendance, to say the least.  The heat of summer will have broken, but for parents of small children, school will not yet have started.  We have just received word from the Chase Park Plaza that the room rate will remain the same, making our luxury hotel a real bargain over the holiday weekend.

Later in September does not work for us, as we have other collecting conferences to attend (assuming things have returned to a state of normalcy by that time).  Luann and I can’t very well organize a meeting that we ourselves would be unable to attend.

Some have suggested holding the meeting in November or even next year, but again, we start running into conflicts with other societies, and we are having a hard time imagining that the pandemic will still be raging in September.  If it is, we will all have much bigger problems than attending a CCI meeting.

One further significant advantage of Labor Day weekend is that the WCHOF museum exhibition, “Dare to Know:  Chess in the Age of Reason” will still be running.  It is not possible to delay the meeting until next year and still expect to see this exhibition.  Remember, we will have an Enlightenment theme for this meeting.  So many of our planned activities and lectures revolve around this theme that if the meeting must be postponed until next year, we might as well not have it at all.  This particular exhibition has always been central to our planning of this particular meeting.  They are joined at the hip.

At this point, the WCHOF is moving forward with work on "Dare to Know" with help from Luann and me, who are loaning a large part of our personal collection to be put on display.  However, the planned opening date of April 8th is currently in limbo, since the WCHOF has just closed its galleries to the public until further notice.  I don’t believe they are planning to open a show in a closed gallery, with no one there to view it, but we will just have to wait and see how this all plays out.  For now, just keep in mind that the meeting Luann and I have been planning has always, and will always, revolve around “Dare to Know” (which will cover the years from roughly 1700 through 1830).  Without this exhibition, we really don’t have a meeting to offer you.

This is not just any ordinary museum exhibition.  In addition to sets, boards, books and other artifacts from our own collection, other contributors to "Dare to Know" are scheduled to include the following:

Collection of Dr. George and Vivian Dean

Collection of Dr. Thomas Thomsen

Collection of Jon Crumiller

Collection of Phil Brykman

Collection of António Horta-Osório

Collection of the Library Company of Philadelphia

If all goes according to plan, there will be antique chess sets of truly global importance in this exhibition, particularly those from the Dean collection, many of which have never been exhibited before, anywhere.  The Library Company of Philadelphia is sending us the last known remnants of Wolfgang von Kempelen's Turk, the legendary chess automaton which debuted at the court of Empress Maria Theresa in 1770, and was destroyed in a museum fire in 1854.  The world-shaking Encyclopédie of Diderot and d'Alembert will be there (a set of the true first editions, 35 vols. published 1751-1780), along with a genuine Encyclopédie chess set to go with it.  And much, much more.

Assuming this Coronavirus pandemic does not result in the end of the world as we know it, we are bound and determined to present this historic exhibition to you at our earliest opportunity, which right now looks like it should be in early September.

Therefore, we hope you can keep your travel plans flexible and join us in St. Louis over Labor Day weekend.  For obvious reasons, our registration deadline (currently March 31) is hereby extended to the end of July.  If you have already registered for the May meeting and paid your fees, and you absolutely cannot attend the Labor Day postponement, just let us know, and we will have our Treasurer Bill Fordney issue you a full refund.  (If the meeting becomes impossible to hold at all due to global events, everyone who registered and paid fees will receive a full refund.)

As we are using a BCC format to comply with European privacy rules, may I please ask the following:

WEBMASTERS:  Please post this to CCI and all other related websites (GSM, Goddesschess, CH&LS, etc.).

NEWSLETTERS:  Jim and Duncan, please publish this in the next issues of The Chess Collector and CCI-USA.

MICHAEL WILTSHIRE:  Please forward this on to the European membership.  (You have my previous list of who these have already gone to.)

Please stay tuned for further updates as they occur.  And thank you for your patience and understanding during this difficult time.  Stay safe and stay healthy!

Best Wishes,

Tom Gallegos &

Luann Woneis,

Organizers

CHESS COLLECTORS INTERNATIONAL