More propaganda. Fortunately it is impossible to ever recover a reputation when you dont have one in the first place.

an ordinary chessplayer wrote on 10/01/17 at 20:29:23:

LOL what? Pretty sure insulting Kovalyov was exactly his intention. You could perhaps say insulting him to this extent was not his intention, but obviously he was trying to get him to follow the rules and insults could help in this regard. Say, if your friend doesn't tip enough and you tell him "come on man, don't be a cheapskate." That's an insult designed to make him follow an unwritten rule. Not to say that "cheapskate" is equivalent to what Zurab said, it's just a random example of the principle.

(I don't agree with the rule, nor do I take Zurab's side to any extent. I'm just trying to say that Vega's statement makes no sense at all.)

Hello.

sim wrote on 10/01/17 at 19:05:46:

Yes. This is not anywhere near serious investigative journalism. Many of the Chessbase comments are about this so if anyone is wondering why just read there.

Apart from some fresh recounts of events from Chief arbiter Delega and Chief organiser Azmaiparashvili (which seem to be in line with previous ones) I could not find anything of interest. The selected people interviewed in the report brought up almost nothing of investigative value; which is not really surprising considering they were mostly not present or did not seem to be near enough to the incident to even give their account of happenings. They also brought up much irrelevancy, but yea, without investigative direction when meeting these people the people interviewed are basically just going to say the stuff that comes up in their minds.

an ordinary chessplayer wrote on 10/01/17 at 20:29:23:

The last part about chess players? I probably would have too if I didn't believe it was so broadly accurate.

For Karlovich not to "warn" about when players are somehow breaking som minor rule or norm seems like an entirely professional way to go about her job. In fact, to my mind, it seems pretty much like an indication of competence from ms. Karlovich.


Have a nice day.

http://en.chessbase.com/post/the-kovalyov-report
Well this is an interesting experiment. Will this kind of attempt at framing the debate, that usually works very well with most audiences, work as well with a chess audience? Aren't chess players generally more used to judging on their own, and aren't they perhaps slightly more intelligent on average?
I think this could be too transparent to fool a large enough percentage of the intended audience.

(Edit: sorry, I don't know if it adds much to the discussion. Maybe I just wanted to vent.)

rest day today presumably

MVL is a very talented player but he does not seem to have much match strategy. Whatever the state of the match he plays the same risky stuff. He should have closed up shop after winning the first game with White.

Fascinating (it wasn't annotated in Megabase and I didn't count the moves). Good show by Navara!

So Aronian converts a Q vs R endgame against MVL under Armageddon conditions. I did a database search and not only Svidler, but also Georg Meier and Kovalev failed to convert this ending in rapid--and Morozevich and Navara failed to convert it in classical controls! What a horrible way for Aronian to lose a Candidates' berth that would have been...