English Chess Forum

So if I were to push Emma Raducanu’s tennis results through the FIDE fair play system, or similar, would it be determined that she must be cheating somehow, and would she then get banned from the activity?

Is Raducanu's performance more remarkable than Freddy Gordon's? I would suggest from a statistical standpoint, no. Freddy has competed in the Scottish Championships, the British Championships, ECU events and recently the Olympiad, has he ever been banned, no. Does that answer your question?

Anyway, congratulations to both players for some remarkable results - sports fans everywhere are very excited at seeing a lot more in the years to come.

Alan Atkinson wrote: ↑

Sun Sep 12, 2021 7:24 am

So if I were to push Emma Raducanu’s tennis results through the FIDE fair play system, or similar, would it be determined that she must be cheating somehow, and would she then get banned from the activity?

I do get the irony, Alan, but apart from gamesmanship (e.g. delaying tactics, unwarranted medical timeouts, lengthy toilet breaks etc.) it is difficult to cheat at tennis. There have indeed been doping incidents (Hingis, Sharapova, Dan Evans), but often because of cocaine use, which I think would scarcely improve quality of shotmaking or even stamina. Serena Williams got into trouble for not being available for testing.

Park social players can cheat with wrong line calls, but Hawkeye has eliminated all the McEnroe-type shenanigans from the professional game. I did not see line judges at the US Open final. Were there any? Had technology completely taken over?

Tennis, unlike chess, does not adapt well to online play infected by cheating, though I remember one of the earliest pub video games was a crude form of batting a ball to and fro.

Consider that Raducanu was ranked 150th in the world, and her opponent in the final 73rd (wtatennis.com). Now, for a chess comparision, look at those rankings and those players' respective ratings on the FIDE list.

A quick glance suggests that's a rating gap of about 30-40 points, and nobody is going to be particularly interested in that as a giant-killing.

Well, it's a little more than 30-40 points, but I was initially considering a player who, a couple of months ago was ranked over 300th, and yet has won one of the top elite events without dropping a set to anybody.

And of course, it is excellent that a couple of new young players seem to have appeared, and their individual match was entertaining and all.

Was just amused by considering how such an overall outcome might be considered in chess circles.

Would an analogy be if a player rated 1800 or so won (say, Praggnananddhaa) a major rapid championship?

Yes, but we all know that isn't his "real" rapid rating.

Matt Mackenzie wrote: ↑

Sun Sep 12, 2021 9:13 pm

Yes, but we all know that isn't his "real" rapid rating.

But no more than 150 or 300 was the 'real' rating of Raducanu given she hadn't competed for 18 months or so because of Covid disruptions...

I’m trying to think of similar breakthroughs. Justin Rose would be one in golf, being a 17 year old amateur coming out of nowhere to finish 4th equal in The Open. Certainly tennis and golf are popular with the media. I’m sure Emma will not be too short of fame and fortune.

Van Foreest Tata Steel

Hardly unknown before that, though.

If we are delving back into history, Gazza at Banja Luka 1979 has to be a pretty good one.

Also, are we talking about breakthroughs, or extremely surprising wins by young and/or unknown outsiders

Winning a Slam under any circumstances is an incredible feat. Even when you're the top seed, 7 chances to get knocked out is a lot. I have Raducanu-mania!

Still. If there was one player at the US Open for whom the stars aligned, it was our Emma. She's now the world #23, and if you assume she didn't get better at tennis over the course of the tournament, that means she was about the 23rd best at tennis at the start of the tournament too.

She played the world numbers 283, 173, 158, 121, 49, 41, 43, 11, 18 and 73. Beating Belinda Bencic at 11 was her giantest killing.

Her final opponent Fernandez knocked out seeds 2, 3, and 5, plus a former world #1, all in three sets including a tiebreak. In the final Fernandez hit the wall, and landed only 56% of her first serves.

Emma's last four opponents had all just cleared a more dangerous adversary out of her way, and then found themselves facing this girl with Q next to her name. Time to relax! Her semi-final opponent knocked out 4, 6 and 10; her quarter-final opponent knocked out 7; her fourth round opponent knocked out 1.

So if I was on the fair play committee, I would conclude that there was nothing suspicious about Raducanu's victory, but that the women's world rankings are currently garbage and need recalibrating to account for the pandemic's effects on training and competition.

The British public (well, those voting at the BBC) currently agree (43%):

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/tennis/58534133

Her victory is compared to 9 other great British sporting triumphs in sports from athletics to netball, hockey, rugby union, cricket, tennis and football. I voted for Andy Murray's first Wimbledon win, with the Rugby World Cup in 2003 a close second and Raducanu's win definitely in my top three or four. If England had won in the Euro 2020 final, I might have gone for that. 1966 feels too long ago now (need to have personally witnessed something to vote for it).

PS. Agree with this: "[tennis] world rankings are [not as accurate as they could be] and need recalibrating to account for the pandemic's effects on training and competition." It is interesting to note that Raducanu as well as playing in the Girls' Singles at Wimbledon earlier in her career, also entered qualifying for Wimbledon in 2018 and 2019, so she was clearly good then as well, so not entirely surprising that she broke through in her teenage years, much like Graf, Hingis, Seles, the Williams sisters, and a host of other female players (this is more common for women than men). A male qualifier winning a Grand Slam title would be harder in my opinion, but several unseeded players have won Grand Slams.