There is something called FIDE World Blitz Chess Championship and it is 23 round Swiss. There are 12 rounds today and 12 rounds tomorrow, which sounds like a lot, and maybe that is the reason for a ton of shameless draws. Then again it is blitz and the waiting time between rounds is probably longer than the games themselves.

Now, there are probably a ton of scandals and shocking developments that are inevitable when a large tournament like this is squeezed into two days. One thing that might have been avoidable was a bizarre game between two well-known Russian super-GMs.

In the video stream the players can be seen seated and waiting for the signal to start the game. They are obviously getting on very well when one of them (Ian Nepomniachtchi) can be seen moving his hand as if making moves and saying something, before cracking up in laughter. Then both players smile. When the rounds starts they both put their hand up to hide their grins and then move their knights around the board for a few moves until they are back at the starting position. Then they agree to a draw and an arbiter, which was watching, follows them when they walk away.

The arbiter interviewed the players and ruled that they should forfeit the match since they had prearranged the result (which I'd say is evident). The decision also references that the players must not bring the game of Chess to decrepitude with their actions.

I don't know if the arbiter could impose harsher punishments on the spot. Probably the disciplinary commission could.

Links:
The game record on chess.com
The unfolding of the event in the youtube stream.
Arbiter ruling on Twitter.


Thinking of this incident, which is especially unusual in that it is in public (no smoke filled room needed) and they are literally giggling about it, the question that occurs to me is: Could this ever happen in Go?

Maybe it couldn't. Draws and draw offers is something that is different which may lower the threshold for the players to fix their game. Another thing is that this is a very large Swiss tournament with endlessly many rounds, that is common in Chess but not in Go. Maybe what you do in the middle of a 21 round tournament really doesn't seem to matter, even for someone contenting for a world championship title.

Maybe this could happen in Go. I have a health dose of Go snobbery and can't imagine how Has anything like this happened in Go? Go has a six(?) thousand year history, maybe everything that could happen happened once already?

It has happened, when

1) The organisers allowed komi bidding and
2) The Russians were involved

Cheers,
Vesa

Go has a very murky past in all the various countries, from murder, GBH and rape downwards (and this includes modern times and both pros and amateurs, orientals and westerners, and public court cases and cases hushed up behind the scenes).

One new word I learnt from the recent chess tournaments is "farming" which is where a player carefully chooses his opponents so as to improve or at least not spoil his Elo rating (which is used for selection to the Candidates. But Shusaku used this very tactic (according to Yasui Sanchi) in order to achieve his record-breaking run in Castle Games.

One new thing (to me) reported this week was suspicion of cheating in Chinese chess by using anal beads: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-67822137. I suppose we'll also get dildo cheats at some point. New proverb: If your opponent smiles, sighs, squeaks, screams, smells or sits down very carefully, call the arbiter.

Players, including (especially) top-level ones, prearrange drawn games all the time, despite the fact that it is against the rules, because it is so often a good idea for both players (or at least not a bad idea for the second one) given the tournament situation. Dubov and Nepomniachtchi sinned chiefly by making it so obvious, which I guess violates rule 11.1 of the FIDE Laws of Chess: "The players shall take no action that will bring the game of chess into disrepute" ("decrepitude" was probably a bad translation).

I guess they brought it on themselves, but the whole thing is pretty silly.

Round 8 of the London Open 1990: https://www.britgo.org/results/1990/london

I don't think it's generally accepted that it is necessarily wrong to agree a draw in a chess tournament, even if it were by pre-arrangement. How the hell do you prove that two players pre-arranged a draw if they stage a 5 hour pretence before agreeing to share the point. I see it as my right to agree a draw, not as a violation of the rules. Beyond which, the idea that an organisation as FIDE could be brought (further) into disrepute is just laughable.

_________________
North Lecale

I found a discussion of the 1990 London Open game by one of the players: http://rusgo.org/an-interview-with-ivan-detkov/

There was also another contemporaneous account in the European Grand Prix Newsletter - reposted below:

The subsequent Ranka yearbook was a little bit more severe, writing that they "contrived to draw" and had been "unsportsmanlike, and refused to cooperate with the congress organisers". I have a vague memory of Harold Lee giving a rather incomprehensible explanation of how to play go on Tomorrow's World. It was bad, but not bad enough to warrant him going to prison for a few years. Speaking of which, I think the clothing rules have caused more of an outcry at the event, and https://twitter.com/SusanPolgar/status/ ... 3203223923 comment merits an answer. Does FIDE not bring itself further into disrepute?

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North Lecale

To me the most shocking thing is the show that they put on. It is like they don't care about anything. As far as I know they could have agreed to a draw on move 1. Maybe they will get away with this, beyond the one forfeit, it was just something silly that they did.

There is audio of their conversation. First Ian can be heard joking with other players about making a draw, but once Daniil arrives they start speaking in Russian. One possibility is that they can be heard talking about making a draw before the game, another is that they are just making some jokes.



I don't know what to expect from FIDE. Fining women 100 euros for not wearing fashionable shoes at first appears silly but then I realized that the male players were really wearing whatever. I'm not sure their shoes were all good. Maybe they also got fines like this?

Btw the two players in this draw scandal made a lot of money for the two day blitz event. My impression is that it was $60-75k in total, it depends on how the shared 5th - 8th place is handled.

I'm guessing a new paragraph was intended when there is no space after full stops, anyway it is more readable if I add that somewhere.



I think this provides an interesting insight into why people cheat and match fix. I can certainly see why people were furious.

I heard this talk of farming too. What seems odder to me is that some super-GMs apparently only play the most exclusive invitational events. That is a different way they have to select their opponents. Leinier Dominguez and Alireza Firouzja went to last minute open events and that doesn't seem wrong to me (as far as I understand this race to get to the Candidates). I think a single draw ruined Leinier Dominguez chances.

I have sometimes wondered if the professional Go scene would be fairer on upcoming players if there were giant Swiss tournaments. At least I miss seeing the top players play the lower rung more. Maybe the new players would develop faster if they had more and earlier opportunity to play the best players?

In a long swiss system tournament, stamina is a factor. If a group of players agree to work as a team, playing low-effort draws against each other while trying to engage rivals in longer, more tiring games, it gives an advantage compared to other players who are working alone and trying to win every game. This is commonly perceived as unfair.

You can go further, agree on which team member is trying to win the tournament, and have the rest of the team lose their games against the leader, while trying to defeat rivals. It's not unlike some of the big cycling races: most people entering the Tour de France do so on the understanding that they're not trying to win a prize; their job is to support the star player on their team. The big difference being that in cycling, it's agreed that everyone is on a team, and there's no secret about who's on which team, so there is no unfair advantage.

Of course it's difficult to prove what's prearranged and what's not in a chess game. During the Soviet era, there were a lot of allegations and little evidence.


Yes, I see this as one of the main reasons why European and American pros are not catching up to the Asian pros. Entering a pro tournament for them means losing to a 9-dan in round 1 of a knockout. There's no chance to play the equivalent of Oteai games against opponents who are only slightly stronger.

This sort of falls into the prearranged category:

The strongest players at the US Go Congress would often have grueling schedules, playing in the US Open during the morning, and then the North American Masters Tournament after dinner.

One day towards the end of the week, two strong players who were good friends knew they would be paired against each other in the evening NAMT round. So they went off to a dorm room and basically played their game early in the afternoon. After dinner, they waltzed into the NAMT room, sat down, and just blitzed out their game from a few hours earlier. They didn't fix the outcome of the game, but they did set themselves up to get a good night's sleep,

I didn't think much of it at the time, but it seems pretty unfair sitting here today.