“Both of these players, Wenjun and Sutovsky, took a quick draw yesterday. And the Goddess of Chess, Caissa, punished them for their crime against the game”, remarked Nigel Short after the round (6). en.chessbase.com/post/gibraltar-rd06
Just one hour into the round (7), on move 14, Hikaru Nakamura and David Anton Guijarro shook hands having repeated the position of an unorthodox Queen’s Gambit played by Nakamura. The American usually fights for blood, but it may have been that Nakamura saw this as an opportune moment to recharge his batteries.
It remains to be seen how goddess Caissa deals with this ‘sin’, as our friend Nigel Short would put it.
What goes around comes around. In round 8 Hou was on the receiving end of a brilliancy from her compatriot Ju Wenjun. That win gives Ju enough rating points to join Judit Polgar, Humpy Koneru, and Hou as the only women to crosss the 2600 FIDE line.
The story is that she was upset with what she felt was the organizers manipulating the pairings to give her a female opponent whenever possible, and this was her way of thumbing her nose at them. I don’t know how many females were in the tournament, but Hou had seven of them in her ten rounds. Statistically speaking, the odds against that happening without human interference must be vanishingly small.
That isn’t to say Hou wasn’t at fault for protesting it the way she did. Making a mockery of the game wasn’t the right way to handle this, and Hou has already apologized for her actions. It remains to be seen what repercussions there will be for her from this.
She could have just sat there and let her time run out. I once had an opponent do that because he was unhappy to be paired with me. After I played my first move he sat there in protest of the pairing. First time I have ever seen a sit-in at a chess tournament.
If the pairings really were made by computer with no human interference (which I understand is the claim by the organizers), I have to wonder just how likely it was for Hou Yifan to face female opponents in 7 of 10 games.
I took a quick look at the starting list of players. With foreign names it’s sometimes difficult to tell which ones are female but I was able to identify between 20 and 30 – out of 150 players total – distributed fairly evenly by rating.
I’m no expert on this kind of thing but I’ve seen enough math puzzles to know that sometimes things that our intuition tells us are unlikely are in fact quite common. There are of course a lot of variables involved in this outcome but it does seem odd to me. Perhaps someone who is a math/probability expert can weigh in on this?
Since pairings aren’t supposed to be random, it would be difficult to figure out. I do recall, however, that Apple or somebody had to redo its randomization software for music because it was too random. It turned out people who had their music set to “random” REALLY didn’t like hearing the same song twice in a row.
We don’t need a math/statistics expert to weigh in on this. What we need is someone familiar with the Swiss Manager software that they used to try to recreate the tournament pairings and see if they really were done without manipulation. It seems highly unlikely, but then long shots do sometimes come through. Somebody is going to win the next Powerball lottery.
One nice thing about the FIDE pairing procedure (at least it’s helpful in this particular case) is that it is completely deterministic. Under US Chess rules two people could come up with different pairings for the same group of players, and both could be correct. With FIDE pairings if two people come up with different pairings for the same group of players at least one of them has erred.
This is being discussed on the ChessBase website as well. One of those commenting there claims to have done what you suggest. He writes:
"… 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 irani
Round 10: equal to pairing in Gibraltar."
So, assuming he’s telling the truth about what he did, I guess that settles it.
