Uhohspaghettio wrote on 05/07/12 at 18:29:47:
fling wrote on 05/07/12 at 06:50:01:
Honestly, why would this be unethical? All people can choose whether they want to do their best or not, right? What kind of world do you live in? If we really could demand the very best from people, we should really go knock on the door of the politicians first...
Anyway, you could also argue Gilchrist did his very best according to the circumstances.
It's not that I think people have to perform their absolute best at all times, I just don't think they should play in circumstances where their performance is like 300-400 points lower than normal. This is as a corollary to my belief against cheating. Firstly, people who beat them are falsely going to think they're doing a good job. Secondly, when the player's performance is better again they'll be damaging the ratings of players because they'll under-rated.
The people extrapolating it to ad absurdum may find it interesting to note that in professional sports it's a criminal offence to intentionally under-perform. Hugely underperforming is just not a good thing to do. I used to play without a mouse sometimes, and would sometimes even actually tell my opponent that afterwards if I lost on time in an annoying way. I know that was a mistake, and I should have made sure to have played with a mouse or at least not tried to take something from the other player with my spiteful remark.
I'm not saying that everyone else should find it unethical to underperform, especially if it's just being quite tired/lazy/drunk and still wanting to play. All I'm saying is that, like claiming that cheating is a terrible thing, drastically underperforming is bad also. What you may not realize is that for the 1800 player, beating a 2200 player three times may feel like the best day of his chess life and he does not realize anything is different. So many problems are solved if people just play properly, and can have some faith that the person at the other end of the line is a normal player, playing honestly in order to try to win.
I think your analogy is flawed because you mentioned professional sports playing professional sports competitions. We are referring to online blitz as leisure or extremely casual practise. You are referring now somehow to professional sports. This is online blitz, not the Ashes Test Series, UEFA Champions League, the Rugby World Cup, or Australian Tennis Open. Obviously a professional athlete will try to perform best in a professional competition. But we are referring to online blitz with fake rating points, no tangible winning prizes, and a place where everyone, from unrated to GM play for fun.
What is "intentionally underperforming"? If someone is losing games by playing 1. f3/2. Kf2/3. Ke3/4. Kd4 and not trying to win or even draw at all but trying to see how quickly one can get checkmated, that sounds like clear purposeful losing. But if someone is busy and wants to play some online blitz and multitask, but yet tries to play reasonably to win or perform well, that is a different scenario.
Even more ridiculous is to apply oneself as if one were sitting a university entrance exam whilst playing 3-minute or 1-minute, or even bughouse or giveaway. I played more than 10.000 bughouse games, most of them 1 0, and honestly I did not care if I lost or won. Or is it also unsportsmanlike to play 1 0 bughouse unless one is 100% applied and considers each game and each move extremely seriously?
I looked at some ICC games of my old coach, and though I will not say who he is, I see that he plays a lot of 1. a3 and 1...a6 in blitz. So I am not sure if he follows your blitz etiquette.
I had a friend who played rated 1-minute with no mouse, but by typing in the moves. He certainly did not care much about his rating points or some form of unspoken etiquette.
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