English Chess Forum

Sad news. I didn't know Syd personally or for long, but his love for the game and the respect in which he was held in the club were obvious.

Can someone explain to me why anyone cares what someone's lichess rating is?

Paolo, you have to be realistic. Chess is a small sport with limited resources. Most players investigated by the FPP deal with the investigating committee in writing. I don't see, in practical terms, what you're proposing. The major factor in most allegations of use of computers is what you term as ...

Leonard, I enjoyed your Guardian piece as always, but one correction - the decision was not made by the Fair Play Commission, which is a general body within FIDE one of whose functions, as I said above, is to recommend bans for players whom they consider to their comfortable satisfaction to have bee...

As to what is 'a reasonable suspicion', I believe that Mr Martynov has said that if the FPP considers the probability of cheating to have occurred to be 51% or higher then it should disqualify the player.

In reply to Matthew's point about the regulations, if people want to pursue this then FIDE's lawyer, Mr Martynov, has commented extensively (in Russian) on Emil Sutovsky's Facebook page, and has also given an hour long interview in Russian to the journalist Ilya Levitov, which can be found on youtub...

>The comment in brackets seems to me extremely poorly worded. I agree; I should not have said 'of course'. However, the investigating committee will be operating in English because that is the lingua franca of the FPC. It is true that in theory a non-English speaking player could be interviewed live...

On the question of self-kibitzing in bridge, the general feeling is that there is no merit in having high-level events without the possibility of kibitzing. The usual platforms were not set up to allow for a time delay and for a long time were not minded to invest the resource to do so. I don't know...

>So speaking to the accused player about their moves reveals little new information. I understand your point, but in specific cases this is not always true. If you look at FIDE's statement, it speaks of four things. Two of them are computer analysis (the Regan test and the platform's algorithms). Th...

Cheating at bridge online is much more about self-kibitzing. Collusion between partners is no doubt commoner than it is at face-to-face bridge, but still far less common. Although it does have to be faced that cohabiting couples as a group have been over-represented in suspected online bridge cheati...

Good grief. It seems extraordinarily mean-spirited to me to complain about obituaries of foreign GMs and well-known players. In my opinion they add to the forum.

Sorry to hear this. I played Yrjo in a Norwegian tournament in about 1982. He met my English with a kind of reversed Wing Gambit a tempo down, and slaughtered me very quickly. He struck me on that evidence as a player with a fine sense of dynamics, and a civil and polite chap in the post-mortem. RIP.

Really sad to hear. My oldest chess friend. David was the strongest Shropshire chess player when I first went to Shrewsbury Chess Club aged four or five in 1967. I am sure I was intolerable, and looking back on it some of the other players obviously thought so, but David's kindness and encouragement...

Chessers of a certain vintage may remember Jeff as a formidable Midlands organiser of the 1970s and 1980s, and in particular as the founder of the Shropshire congress. Many juniors of the time stayed at their farmhouse in Shropshire during both this event and others (including the Forrest Cup and th...

Sad news. RIP, Dave. I can't believe he wasn't an IM; of course the title was much harder to get then. What I will remember is the twinkle he always had in his eye; it was always an event to play him. I didn't know he was still playing bridge; I used to see him sometimes at the Young Chelsea in the ...