More Bad News From Europe

YESTERDAY lunch time the 30th Kyiv* spring chess festival, due to have started in the Ukrainian capital next Tuesday, was postponed to the second half of April.

A new start date of some time between April 15 and April 25 has been semi-promised.

However the chief arbiter, Olexandr Prohorov, has warned me the big problem is finding a venue as, it seems, the original university site will not be available then.

Meanwhile, either late last night or early this morning, the CzechTour updated its site to reveal that winter tournaments in Mariánské Lázně and Prague that had been postponed from January to April have now been cancelled.

Instead it is hoped to hold summer tournaments in Pardubice from July 15, Prague from August 7 and Sunny Beach, Bulgaria, from September 3.

This means that, for the second year running, there will be no festival in Olomouc.

The silver lining in all this is that I played at last summer's Pardubice and Prague events and can recommend them as well-organised with picturesque surroundings.

I posted about Prague on my blog starting with https://beauchess.blogspot.com/2020/08/czechthis-out.html.

*Kyiv is aka Kiev - it's a Beijing/Peking thing.