by morninj on 2/4/17, 5:16 PM with 109 comments
by slyall on 2/4/17, 6:13 PM
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I see a lot of remarks saying "well, let them show the machine, so someone can check it", "It must be manipulated, this is so unlikely", etc.
The FIDE Swiss Dutch rules are on the FIDE website, in the handbook. There is pairings.fide.com which has a list of endorsed pairing software, meaning it was tested by FIDE to follow those rules. Why is nobody doing the checks?
Guess what? I did :)
Took the SwissManager tournament file from chess-results.com, created a TRF / FIDE rating report file, imported it, verified the pairings.
Round 1: differences, which is to be expected:
people show up late, ratings get corrected, mistakes fixed, etc.
Round 2, 3, 4: equal to the pairing in Gibraltar
Round 5: a few differences in the group of people with 1.5 and 1 out of 4, nowhere near Hou.
My educated guess: results of previous rounds were corrected after round 5 was paired
Round 6, 7, 8: equal to pairing in Gibraltar
Round 9: in the lower echelons 2 pairings were adjusted (the black players exchanged),
due to (probably) Israeli not playing Iranian
Round 10: equal to pairing in Gibraltar.
by rm999 on 2/4/17, 6:21 PM
As someone who does statistics for a living and used to play tournament chess, a few of my disorganized opinions/thoughts:
* There's no conclusive evidence that her pairings were tampered with, and the pairings are in line with what seeds someone would be given by a computer. The probability of her playing that many women is very low, but the whole point of randomness is rare events happen (as humans we're very good at detecting patterns in randomness). Her accusations are plausible but not a given.
* I think her goal to break down the barriers of gendered chess is great. The chess world needs more women, and if there were more they would be completely competitive with men. She's fighting a good fight.
* One of the reasons I stopped playing chess is the egos. This one was relatively mild, but purposefully losing games is wrong, even if done in protest. Once you sit down at the chessboard and shake the other person's hand, you're agreeing to a good game. Throwing a game against a woman because you're grumpy she's a woman is not a good thing.
* But, her activist tactic worked, here we are talking about it.
by gjkood on 2/4/17, 7:14 PM
I was curious if the women player's ratings were separated from the Top 100 players rankings and thought that the overall FIDE Top 100 ratings was gender differentiated.
On a perusal of the FIDE rankings over the years I noticed that that is not the case.
Here are the stats for this year (Feb 2017):
--------------------------------------------
Top 100 Players:
Rank; Name; FIDE Rating
1; Carlsen, Magnus; 2838
...
100; Artemlev, Vladislav; 2655
101; Cordova, Emilio; 2655
Top 100 Women Players:
Rank; Name; FIDE Rating
1; Hou, Yifan; 2651
Here are the stats for the earliest reported year (2000):
---------------------------------------------------------
Top 100 Players:
Rank; Name; FIDE Rating
1; Kasparov, Garry; 2849
...
32; Polgar, Judith; 2656
...
100; Fominyih, Alexander; 2594
Top 100 Women Players:
Rank; Name; FIDE Rating
1; Polgar, Judith; 2656
So even though there is a separate Women Players ranking provided, the Top 100 Players is not gender differentiated.
It just happens that this year, Hou, Yifan, the current top women player is ranked lower than the bottom of the Top 100 players ranking hence the top 100 payers (this year) is all men.
What does that mean? Does that mean that women players do not get a chance to play among men? Are there less opportunities for mixed events?
If so, yes that should definitely be changed.
by throwaway91111 on 2/4/17, 5:56 PM
by zzleeper on 2/4/17, 5:55 PM
by facepalm on 2/4/17, 6:27 PM
by DavidWanjiru on 2/4/17, 6:47 PM
by vivekd on 2/5/17, 8:25 PM
So, for example, when have a group of 10 men and 10 women, and you randomly pair them up in a tournament, it is normal and possible for a woman to be playing against 5 women in a row. It's not an aberration because small numbers won't necessarily even out. However, when you get a group of 1000 men and 1000 women, and start paring them up for tournament matches, it would still be possible for a woman to end up playing against 5 woman in a row, but on the whole when taking all 500 matches she plays, it should approach 50, the aberration would be if she had played against 500 women in a row. That would be an indication of something suspicious.
This is an example of the gambler's fallacy.
by Kiro on 2/4/17, 9:34 PM
by georgeoliver on 2/4/17, 11:54 PM
by zxcvvcxz on 2/4/17, 6:10 PM
If so then it probably makes sense that more of one population would match with each other, assuming there are significant statistical differences in the populations. For Chess, this is most certainly the case (top 100 is almost all male iirc).
by sulam on 2/4/17, 7:47 PM
by ManlyBread on 2/6/17, 2:15 PM
by rshm on 2/4/17, 6:52 PM
Game pairing in Go for example is usually a random pool (bingo; pick your number from a bowl), after that it is straightforward knockout.
by natch on 2/4/17, 6:29 PM
by losteverything on 2/5/17, 6:15 AM
I would think that if opponent was throwing the game I'd double down and try to throw it better than her. So the chess match became a chess match. Who can lose fastest. Then resigning is cowardly.
by Proven on 2/5/17, 5:45 AM
Kudos to her for competing with the best.
by justintocci on 2/4/17, 6:15 PM
by obstinate on 2/4/17, 5:55 PM
> I understand: If I was in her shoes, and I suddenly pulled a draw of six girls one after the other, I would say also, 'What is going on here?'
Maybe in the speaker's culture, using the diminutive term "girls" to refer to professional women in a professional context is considered fine, but it's definitely grating to me. I'd be willing to give that a pass if that were all. But he also said:
> I'm sorry for Yifan, because I think she let herself down a little bit today.
I really think Yifan is in a better position to judge whether she has let herself down than Callaghan is. Together these two comments read, to me, as quite paternalistic and tone deaf. If this is how he's speaking on the record, one has to wonder if his private attitude contributed to Yifan's decision to throw the game.