In Just 5 Moves, Grandmaster Loses and Leaves Chess World Aghast

There are pretty strong rules about how the draw on FIDE tournaments can be done and the programs that make them have to be certified. In one forum someone said they actually checked:<p>----<p>I see a lot of remarks saying &quot;well, let them show the machine, so someone can check it&quot;, &quot;It must be manipulated, this is so unlikely&quot;, etc.<p>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?<p>Guess what? I did :)<p>Took the SwissManager tournament file from chess-results.com, created a TRF &#x2F; FIDE rating report file, imported it, verified the pairings.<p><pre><code> 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. </code></pre> Does that count as sticking to the facts?

There&#x27;s some good discussion in this reddit thread: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;chess&#x2F;comments&#x2F;5rm88g&#x2F;hou_yifan_resigns_after_5_moves_in_the_2017" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;chess&#x2F;comments&#x2F;5rm88g&#x2F;hou_yifan_res...</a>.<p>As someone who does statistics for a living and used to play tournament chess, a few of my disorganized opinions&#x2F;thoughts:<p>* There&#x27;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&#x27;re very good at detecting patterns in randomness). Her accusations are plausible but not a given.<p>* 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&#x27;s fighting a good fight.<p>* 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&#x27;s hand, you&#x27;re agreeing to a good game. Throwing a game against a woman because you&#x27;re grumpy she&#x27;s a woman is not a good thing.<p>* But, her activist tactic worked, here we are talking about it.

&gt; Hou, who currently outpaces the second-ranked female player by 68 points, recently left the women&#x27;s chess circuit for mixed events where she can compete against men, who fill every spot in the world&#x27;s top 100 rankings.<p>I was curious if the women player&#x27;s ratings were separated from the Top 100 players rankings and thought that the overall FIDE Top 100 ratings was gender differentiated.<p>On a perusal of the FIDE rankings over the years I noticed that that is not the case.<p>Here are the stats for this year (Feb 2017):<p>--------------------------------------------<p>Top 100 Players:<p>Rank; Name; FIDE Rating<p>1; Carlsen, Magnus; 2838<p>...<p>100; Artemlev, Vladislav; 2655<p>101; Cordova, Emilio; 2655<p>Top 100 Women Players:<p>Rank; Name; FIDE Rating<p>1; Hou, Yifan; 2651<p>Here are the stats for the earliest reported year (2000):<p>---------------------------------------------------------<p>Top 100 Players:<p>Rank; Name; FIDE Rating<p>1; Kasparov, Garry; 2849<p>...<p>32; Polgar, Judith; 2656<p>...<p>100; Fominyih, Alexander; 2594<p>Top 100 Women Players:<p>Rank; Name; FIDE Rating<p>1; Polgar, Judith; 2656<p>So even though there is a separate Women Players ranking provided, the Top 100 Players is not gender differentiated.<p>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.<p>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?<p>If so, yes that should definitely be changed.

Why are tournaments (or rankings; it&#x27;s hard to tell from the article) sexed in the first place?

It would be good to know the chances for that. I&#x27;m guessing most of the other participants at each round were men, so they must have been pretty low...

Misleading headline: she threw the match to protest against the tournament setup, having to play against too many women.

I don&#x27;t follow chess, and I didn&#x27;t know it&#x27;s gendered. That doesn&#x27;t make sense. Why would chess contests be gendered? That&#x27;s like a gendered photography contest.

I was just reading a book about this, &quot;The undoing project&quot;. The point of the book was that statically even distribution only works in large numbers, in small numbers its normal to get uneven distributions like this. That&#x27;s why sample size is so important in scientific research.<p>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&#x27;s not an aberration because small numbers won&#x27;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.<p>This is an example of the gambler&#x27;s fallacy.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;onlinecourses.science.psu.edu&#x2F;stat100&#x2F;node&#x2F;46" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;onlinecourses.science.psu.edu&#x2F;stat100&#x2F;node&#x2F;46</a>

I don&#x27;t understand how it was a loss?<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.chessgames.com&#x2F;perl&#x2F;chessgame?gid=1860931" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.chessgames.com&#x2F;perl&#x2F;chessgame?gid=1860931</a>

What I find interesting and am curious about people&#x27;s thoughts on here is that while Yifan could have waited until she was able to run the pairing algorithm herself (as someone did see the comment <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=13568108" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=13568108</a>), her protest could be no less valid even though it&#x27;s based on apparently inaccurate information.

Question: isn&#x27;t the drawing of opponents dependent on relative ratings?<p>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).

Ignoring the match itself, the commenters seem incredibly sexist. They repeatedly ignored&#x2F;interrupted a woman saying she&#x27;d actually talked to the player to comment on whether or not the player was &#x27;mental&#x27; or &#x27;still drunk&#x27; or otherwise.

So she was nowhere near as good as the men who participated in the tournament and rage quit because she had to play against women? Isn&#x27;t that pretty sexist on her part?

What additional value does the ranked pool bring compared to random pool for pairing.<p>Game pairing in Go for example is usually a random pool (bingo; pick your number from a bowl), after that it is straightforward knockout.

Maybe they need to consider the idea of better-than-random pairings. What this means would be a subject for discussion, but for example there could be heuristics that say something like pairings need to at least look random. What does that mean? Again, it&#x27;s a matter for discussion, but just to take the Yifan situation as the example, seven out of nine paired with the same gender does not look random. Just saying &quot;it&#x27;s decided by machines&quot; is not sufficient. They have to say what the rules are that the machines are going by, and what is the source of randomness exactly. And then they have to address the point that maybe pure randomness is not good enough.

She resigned? Them why make 5 moves?<p>I would think that if opponent was throwing the game I&#x27;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.

Why the hell does chess need to be divided by sexes? Ridiculous!<p>Kudos to her for competing with the best.

[whatever - i&#x27;ll go somewhere else]

I really didn&#x27;t like the comments of the tournament GM as quoted in this article.<p>&gt; 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, &#x27;What is going on here?&#x27;<p>Maybe in the speaker&#x27;s culture, using the diminutive term &quot;girls&quot; to refer to professional women in a professional context is considered fine, but it&#x27;s definitely grating to me. I&#x27;d be willing to give that a pass if that were all. But he also said:<p>&gt; I&#x27;m sorry for Yifan, because I think she let herself down a little bit today.<p>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&#x27;s speaking on the record, one has to wonder if his private attitude contributed to Yifan&#x27;s decision to throw the game.