Candidates Tournament, midway through

We're nearly halfway through the 2018 Candidates Tournament (6 of the 14 rounds have been played).

The contest is hard-fought, with not much space from first (Caruana) to last (Karjakin). There have been 9 decisive results, and 15 draws. Of the decisive results, 5 have been with the white pieces, and 4 with the black pieces. Kramnik's games have been the sharpest, as he has had 2 wins, 2 losses, and 2 draws. Only Ding Liren, the 25-year-old Chinese superstar, has no decisive results yet, playing 6 draws so far.

Meanwhile, if all these beautiful, if deep and mysterious, grandmaster chess games aren't providing you enough entertainment, perhaps you need to liven things up (and no, I don't mean you should start rooting for the University of Maryland Baltimore County Retrievers, wonderful though last night's result was)?

Rather, you could get your way over to Twitch, and tune in to the hottest e-Sport online: I Want My ChessTV

Compare that to a typical session with the Chessbrahs, the most popular chess streamers on Twitch. Over the course of one of their streams, which can last up to four hours, you might see chairs thrown amid a torrent of f-bombs, freestyle rapping mid-game, and a never-ending barrage of trash talk. This is the new, online era of chess—set to the soundtrack of dance music.

Although certainly not the same thing as the Chessbrahs, chess as an e-Sport is finding, perhaps, some real traction.

Here, locally, there's a significant e-Sports chess event just a few weeks away: PRO Chess League Finals Set For San Francisco

The world's best chess players will travel to San Francisco to compete in a live championship organized by Chess.com and Twitch, the companies announced today. This epic event will be the culmination of Chess.com's Professional Rapid Online (PRO) Chess League, a groundbreaking, season-long competition with the world's top chess players representing international regions. The two-day event kicks off at 10 a.m. on April 7 at the Folsom Street Foundry and will also be live-broadcast exclusively on Chess.com’s Twitch channel (twitch.tv/chess).

Twitch have immense resources behind them, as they are part of Amazon, now.

So, who knows? Maybe this is really a thing?