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Dark Knight / Le Chevalier Noir
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---- Nous avons besoin d'un traduction français!
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As of 2006, Steward Reuben is chairman of the FIDE Organisers' Committee and a member of other FIDE committees. He holds the FIDE International Arbiter and International Organizer titles.
I am not sure if he has any official standing in this tournament.
2 games of rapid play - 10 minutes + 5 seconds per move added (Fischer).
If the score is tied after 2 games then 2 games of blitz – 3 minutes + 2 seconds per move will be played with opposite colours from the first match.
If the score is still tied a sudden death game will be played with obligation to win with white with the time control of 4 minutes + 2 seconds per move for white and 3 minutes + 2 seconds per move for black. Lots will be drawn just before this final game and the winner will choose his colour.
5. The winner takes the £23,000 first prize. The loser(s) will have their prize money divided amongst the players with whom they are tied, including those who did not participate in the playoff.
________
Hikaru Nakamura beats David Anton in the second game of their playoff and wins Gibraltar. The young Spaniard was amazingly strong and at 21 years of age has a brilliant future.
Hikaru Nakamura is the 2017 Gibraltar champion after the playoffs.
From the official site:
Congratulations to Hikaru Nakamura (USA), winner of the Tradewise Gibraltar Masters for a third consecutive year. He defeated GM David Antón Guijarro (ESP) after a tense two-game speed playoff. Ju Wenjun won the Women’s prize and takes home £15,000.
Followed a bit of the tournament, watched a couple master classes, couple interviews. Most interestingly, followed some of the analyzes, live or replay, from the official commentary team GM Simon Williams and IM Jovanka Houska. Never seen them do commentary before, but was overall very entertaining and enjoyable. Good chemistry between the two as well, something you don't often see when you have two people doing commentary.
This tournament's coverage was overall pretty fantastic.
- Hou Yifan has the right to protest being paired w/ 7 women, as we can see only 30 woman of 250 players, that is only 10% chance to be paired w/ woman, if there is manipulation of swiss pairing, its against the fide rules and Hou Yifan should know
- Hou Yifan has the right to protest being paired w/ 7 women, as we can see only 30 woman of 250 players, that is only 10% chance to be paired w/ woman, if there is manipulation of swiss pairing, its against the fide rules and Hou Yifan should know
After a 5-min investigation by repairing on my computer with the tournament file, I got the same Round 7 pairings as they are on chess-results.
Why did not she complain after seeing Round 4 pairings - 4 woman in a row?
(I should probably keep out of this debate, but I can't help it.)
Consider this: If you use the law of probability to calculate the probability of being paired against 7 women in 10 games, then you are assuming that the pairings are random. But they are not random at all, they are made according to the Swiss system.
There are known statistical anomalies that can happen from Swiss pairings. For example, a player in the middle of the rating field will sometimes lose all their white games and win all their black games. I've seen this happen more than once. It happens because the Swiss is geared to give you White and Black alternately, and to give you a stronger opponent when you win and a weaker opponent when you lose. Sometimes these effects synchronize, and you get alternately Black against a weak opponent and White against a strong opponent (or vice versa), producing results that at first glance seem extremely improbable.
What does this have to do with Hou Yifan's pairings, you may ask. Nothing really; the point is just to show that a Swiss tournament has its own dynamics, and that you cannot simply apply the law of probability and assume that pairings are random.
I'm going to stick my neck out and propose a hypothesis. Maybe a Swiss tournament has an inherent dynamic that creates "clusters" of players. With "cluster" I mean a group of players who tend to keep running into each other in the pairings, as a result of some complicated interaction of the pairing rules regarding color distribution, the inherent tendency to alternately meet stronger and weaker opponents, and possibly other factors that I haven't thought of.
Now, if this cluster happens to contain a larger percentage of red-haired people than the field at large, you're going to see an unusual number of pairings between red-haired people. Or, if it happens to contain more Italians, you'll see a lot of games between Italians. You get the idea.
The point of this cluster hypothesis is that instead of 7 unlikely events (as in Hou Yifan's case), you only have to explain one unlikely event: That a cluster was created that had an unusual gender distribution.
I got the idea for the cluster hypothesis by browsing cursorily through the pairings. I think there were 3 or 4 women who played an unusual number of other women, and if I'm not mistaken most of these women played each other. I got the feeling that they also played many of the same opponents overall. So that could be one such cluster.
Unfortunately I don't have the time right now to check this for real. The input from an actual statistician would be very welcome.
You would need to dig very deep to create an alternative fact - a manipulation of bye-players to get annoyed Hou Yifan at the end of the tournament. Seems that arbiters and players had nothing to do in Gibraltar anymore LOL
This situation is completely ridiculous.
The pairings do look correct as per pairings rules.
So you get paired against 7 women in a 255-person field that has 35-40 women playing, in a 10 round tournament. "Tough" luck. I would be willing to bet that the average 2650+ player would probably like that, it'd mean a couple of tough pairings but playing down the whole tournament, especially taking into account the juicy category prizes.
It's also interesting to look at the pairings posted by B. Sambuev in the post above. Hou Yifan, when paired against women, often times "barely missed" playing another woman. She was sitting beside other women, in the lower half of her point-group bracket, like her opponent. In other words, for her rating, in her point group (performing more or less as expected), several of the candidate opponents for any given round were also women. This is because there were plenty women in the rating range that would get paired against someone 2650, in several of those rounds. So I am not sure how much "bad luck" she even had.
Either way, the pairings look correct and there's nothing to complain about. This sort of "protest" is completely unacceptable and I am surprised Hou Yifan is getting as much sympathy as she's getting. She essentially threw the game, which is a violation of the competition and displays abysmal sportsmanship. In addition, she is directly or indirectly claiming / implying (?) that the organizer / arbiter decided to use the hand of God in making the pairings, for whatever reason. There's absolutely nothing wrong with questioning the pairings. Several players do and if something doesn't look right, players should question them. More often than not, there's a good reason for "unusual" looking pairings. It often has to do with sub-optimal conditions of colours, etc...
In any case... it is extremely surprising (to me) that a player of Hou Yifan's calibre doesn't know how pairings work. It is also surprising that she does this without the consultation of a different professional arbiter who would have told her "These guys messed with your pairings". If she is just protesting against "the luck of the draw", this was all wrong. This is not how you do it! When you play in an amateur tournament that goes to great lengths (sponsorship, special prizes) to attract top women players, this is a real possibility (7/10 women pairings)!
If this was any other player, would the reactions be different? Would there be sanctions? How serious is this? In the grand scheme of things, it's as the organizer Brian Callaghan pointed out. She's damaged her own image / reputation all on her own. But it's totally shameful. It wouldn't be out of order if she stopped receiving invitations for future editions of this tournament.
Now that I have seen Bator's posting (yes, well done...) it is clear that she just had bad luck...
and she shouldn't complain and in any case, just throwing the final game was wrong.
What I don't understand about the protest is (even if the reason was valid)
a) she is higher rated than all the women, so therefore was the favorite in those games.
b) she was still in contention for the top woman prize, as in
c) round 10 she was playing a lower rated male, with White.
What I don't understand about the protest is (even if the reason was valid)
a) she is higher rated than all the women, so therefore was the favorite in those games.
b) she was still in contention for the top woman prize, as in
c) round 10 she was playing a lower rated male, with White.
Hi Tony:
From my observation of her over the years, she seems very straight and quite principled.
1. She refused to play in one of the women's world championships, because FIDE changed the dates, and she had already committed for that time to another organizer.
2. She has refused to play in the current women's championship because she sees it as disrespecting the status of the Women's World Chess Champion (If I've understood her correspondence with FIDE on this).
Maybe she just is objecting to the immoral interference of an arbiter with the objective pairings system, to insert his/her view of what is best (ie - woman playing woman in last round with top women's prize at stake).
She doesn't care much about the status or the money....she just wants it done right, whether it affects her negatively or not??
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