
In Just 5 Moves, Grandmaster Loses and Leaves Chess World Aghast - morninj
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/02/03/513259703/in-just-5-moves-grandmaster-loses-and-leaves-chess-world-aghast
======
slyall
There are pretty strong rules about how the draw on FIDE tournaments can be
done and the programs that make them have to be certified. In one forum
someone said they actually checked:

\----

I see a lot of remarks saying "well, let them show the machine, so someone can
check it", "It must be manipulated, this is so unlikely", etc.

The FIDE Swiss Dutch rules are on the FIDE website, in the handbook. There is
pairings.fide.com which has a list of endorsed pairing software, meaning it
was tested by FIDE to follow those rules. Why is nobody doing the checks?

Guess what? I did :)

Took the SwissManager tournament file from chess-results.com, created a TRF /
FIDE rating report file, imported it, verified the pairings.

    
    
      Round 1: differences, which is to be expected: 
        people show up late, ratings get corrected, mistakes fixed, etc.
      Round 2, 3, 4: equal to the pairing in Gibraltar
      Round 5: a few differences in the group of people with 1.5 and 1 out of 4, nowhere near Hou.
        My educated guess: results of previous rounds were corrected after round 5 was paired
      Round 6, 7, 8: equal to pairing in Gibraltar
      Round 9: in the lower echelons 2 pairings were adjusted (the black players exchanged),
        due to (probably) Israeli not playing Iranian
      Round 10: equal to pairing in Gibraltar.
    

Does that count as sticking to the facts?

~~~
stonesixone
If people agree that the software was correct but that the pairings were poor,
there is always the possibility of reevaluating the algorithm itself. For
example, an algorithm could be chosen that results in more "mixing."

~~~
dsacco
You can only optimize an algorithm in so many dimensions. Without making this
a debate about affirmative action, I'd like to point out that if you're
designing an algorithm to optimize for raw skill comparison in tournament
match-ups, optimizing it to rebalance match-up results to be more mixed
essentially voids that first optimization. In the aggregate, you're producing
very different results by doing that. To put it simply, would you rather have
skill-based fairness in a tournament or gender-based fairness?

You can design the algorithm in such a way that your priors are mistaken, or
bias creeps in (though _theoretically_ that can be self-corrected). But
assuming that's not the case, and the algorithm correctly matches up mostly
women v. women and men v. men in a skill parity optimization, you have a fair
result for the purpose of a tournemant; i.e. _skill-based match-ups._

If at that point you have an issue with the match ups for reasons of gender or
ethnic parity, I would argue that you should seek to correct the upstream
issues, not the algorithm. In other words, try to get more women playing chess
- make the sport appeal to them more, make it more inclusive, etc. Rebalancing
an algorithm is, in my view, a handicap, whether it's applied to gender
disparity or any other disparity. I feel it does a disservice to both parties
and doesn't really solve the root issue.

~~~
stonesixone
There can be a balance. One could introduce more mixing while still relying
primarily on the current metrics. It's not a binary choice between one or the
other.

~~~
kaffeemitsahne
It's actually a binary choice between a gender-biased algorithm and a gender-
neutral algorithm. A small bias is still a bias.

~~~
totalZero
I don't fundamentally disagree with you, but I note that when you say "small
bias," you're acknowledging that there is a continuum between total neutrality
and total bias.

~~~
4ifgnapoian
I don't see how you arrived at the conclusion that the cardinality of biases
is greater than the cardinality of natural numbers from the proposition(s) of
the post you replied to. If that was the intent of your post, please
elaborate.

------
rm999
There's some good discussion in this reddit thread:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/5rm88g/hou_yifan_res...](https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/5rm88g/hou_yifan_resigns_after_5_moves_in_the_2017).

As someone who does statistics for a living and used to play tournament chess,
a few of my disorganized opinions/thoughts:

* There's no conclusive evidence that her pairings were tampered with, and the pairings are in line with what seeds someone would be given by a computer. The probability of her playing that many women is very low, but the whole point of randomness is rare events happen (as humans we're very good at detecting patterns in randomness). Her accusations are plausible but not a given.

* I think her goal to break down the barriers of gendered chess is great. The chess world needs more women, and if there were more they would be completely competitive with men. She's fighting a good fight.

* One of the reasons I stopped playing chess is the egos. This one was relatively mild, but purposefully losing games is wrong, even if done in protest. Once you sit down at the chessboard and shake the other person's hand, you're agreeing to a good game. Throwing a game against a woman because you're grumpy she's a woman is not a good thing.

* But, her activist tactic worked, here we are talking about it.

~~~
gjkood
> Throwing a game against a woman because you're grumpy she's a woman is not a
> good thing.

Not to be pedantic, but Lalith Babu, the Indian Grand Master, is male. I
believe the article says Hou Yifan threw the final match against Lalith Babu.
She played all the women pairings till she got there.

Not to mention how the winner of that match would feel with such a terrible
victory.

~~~
rm999
Not pedantic at all, thanks for the correction!

------
gjkood
> Hou, who currently outpaces the second-ranked female player by 68 points,
> recently left the women's chess circuit for mixed events where she can
> compete against men, who fill every spot in the world's top 100 rankings.

I was curious if the women player's ratings were separated from the Top 100
players rankings and thought that the overall FIDE Top 100 ratings was gender
differentiated.

On a perusal of the FIDE rankings over the years I noticed that that is not
the case.

Here are the stats for this year (Feb 2017):

\--------------------------------------------

Top 100 Players:

Rank; Name; FIDE Rating

1; Carlsen, Magnus; 2838

...

100; Artemlev, Vladislav; 2655

101; Cordova, Emilio; 2655

Top 100 Women Players:

Rank; Name; FIDE Rating

1; Hou, Yifan; 2651

Here are the stats for the earliest reported year (2000):

\---------------------------------------------------------

Top 100 Players:

Rank; Name; FIDE Rating

1; Kasparov, Garry; 2849

...

32; Polgar, Judith; 2656

...

100; Fominyih, Alexander; 2594

Top 100 Women Players:

Rank; Name; FIDE Rating

1; Polgar, Judith; 2656

So even though there is a separate Women Players ranking provided, the Top 100
Players is not gender differentiated.

It just happens that this year, Hou, Yifan, the current top women player is
ranked lower than the bottom of the Top 100 players ranking hence the top 100
payers (this year) is all men.

What does that mean? Does that mean that women players do not get a chance to
play among men? Are there less opportunities for mixed events?

If so, yes that should definitely be changed.

------
throwaway91111
Why are tournaments (or rankings; it's hard to tell from the article) sexed in
the first place?

~~~
nilkn
The major titles, tournaments, and ratings aren't gendered and haven't been
for a long time. That said, it is still the case that today's active male
players tend to be overwhelmingly better than active female players at chess,
so separate tournaments and titles were specifically created just for women.
No women are restricted from the "main" tournaments or the "main" titles,
though. It is entirely possible for a woman to dethrone Magnus Carlsen as
World Chess Champion -- it's just never happened before.

As for _why_ this discrepancy exists, that's really a very different question,
and it's one that I don't know the answer to. There are potentially _many_
factors at play. It could be as innocent as there are many more male players
than female, so the odds are much higher for super-high-skill players to
emerge in the male population than the female population.

~~~
winfred
>As for why this discrepancy exists, that's really a very different question,
and it's one that I don't know the answer to.

That's caused by IQ distribution differences between males and females. On
average men and women have an IQ of 100, but there are more men that are both
smarter and dumber than women.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_intelligenc...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_intelligence)

~~~
hyperbovine
According to the article you linked, research findings, including those on
variability between sexes, are all over the map. This does not at all seem
like a convincing explanation to me.

------
zzleeper
It would be good to know the chances for that. I'm guessing most of the other
participants at each round were men, so they must have been pretty low...

------
facepalm
Misleading headline: she threw the match to protest against the tournament
setup, having to play against too many women.

------
DavidWanjiru
I don't follow chess, and I didn't know it's gendered. That doesn't make
sense. Why would chess contests be gendered? That's like a gendered
photography contest.

~~~
jdietrich
It's not strictly gendered - women are free to enter any tournament and hold
any title. There are a number of women-only tournaments and titles, purely to
improve the visibility of women in the game. Without women-only tournaments,
you'd see very few women at major events.

Only one woman has ever qualified for the world championships (Judit Polgar in
2005). Hou Yifan is the best female player in the world, but she's ranked
105th overall. The second highest ranked female player is 303rd.

Gendered tournaments aren't ideal, but the alternative is worse. Most
countries do a dismal job of promoting female participation in chess, with
China being a notable exception. Western women just aren't being encouraged to
take up the game and aren't made to feel welcome when they try.

------
vivekd
I was just reading a book about this, "The undoing project". The point of the
book was that statically even distribution only works in large numbers, in
small numbers its normal to get uneven distributions like this. That's why
sample size is so important in scientific research.

So, for example, when have a group of 10 men and 10 women, and you randomly
pair them up in a tournament, it is normal and possible for a woman to be
playing against 5 women in a row. It's not an aberration because small numbers
won't necessarily even out. However, when you get a group of 1000 men and 1000
women, and start paring them up for tournament matches, it would still be
possible for a woman to end up playing against 5 woman in a row, but on the
whole when taking all 500 matches she plays, it should approach 50, the
aberration would be if she had played against 500 women in a row. That would
be an indication of something suspicious.

This is an example of the gambler's fallacy.

[https://onlinecourses.science.psu.edu/stat100/node/46](https://onlinecourses.science.psu.edu/stat100/node/46)

------
Kiro
I don't understand how it was a loss?

[http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1860931](http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1860931)

~~~
Davidp00
She resigned

------
georgeoliver
What I find interesting and am curious about people's thoughts on here is that
while Yifan could have waited until she was able to run the pairing algorithm
herself (as someone did see the comment
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13568108](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13568108)),
her protest could be no less valid even though it's based on apparently
inaccurate information.

------
zxcvvcxz
Question: isn't the drawing of opponents dependent on relative ratings?

If so then it probably makes sense that more of one population would match
with each other, assuming there are significant statistical differences in the
populations. For Chess, this is most certainly the case (top 100 is almost all
male iirc).

~~~
dnljms
She's the top ranked woman. If that was the case, she'd be playing mostly
against men.

~~~
zxcvvcxz
Regardless, the only way to know if it was a statistically fair setup is to
have: 1) the rankings of all playings in the tournament, and 2) the algorithm
used to match players.

If 2) matches players of similar ratings against eachother, and she is more
similar in rating to women than men, then I don't see what the fuss is all
about.

------
sulam
Ignoring the match itself, the commenters seem incredibly sexist. They
repeatedly ignored/interrupted a woman saying she'd actually talked to the
player to comment on whether or not the player was 'mental' or 'still drunk'
or otherwise.

~~~
zakk
What you describe is being rude and bad-mannered. Being rude to a woman is not
automatically being sexist.

~~~
brainfire
Talking over a woman who is speaking for herself, and discussing whether she
is competent without her input, is a classically sexist way to be rude.

~~~
zakk
No, it's not, someone is simply rude and talks over everyone. A rude person
will talk over men, women (without being sexist), black people (without being
racist), etc.

Either you demonstrate that the arrogance is specifically targeted towards
women and because they are women, or you cannot speak of sexism.

------
ManlyBread
So she was nowhere near as good as the men who participated in the tournament
and rage quit because she had to play against women? Isn't that pretty sexist
on her part?

------
rshm
What additional value does the ranked pool bring compared to random pool for
pairing.

Game pairing in Go for example is usually a random pool (bingo; pick your
number from a bowl), after that it is straightforward knockout.

~~~
ekun
From loosely following chess over the past year it seems they normally play a
random pool and whoever has the best score at the end wins the tournament.

~~~
slyall
No that isn't the case. There are really only two common types of tournaments.
A round-robin will see each player play every other player once but this is
limited to small fields (10 is the usual limit).

For big fields like the one the article is about the Swiss System is used.
Each player gets 1 for a win, half a point for a draw and zero for a loss.
Players are mostly paired against those who are on the same score each round.
I say "mostly" since there are all sorts of rules to decide the exact
pairings. Chess tournaments will use Dutch-Swiss or sometimes Dubov-Swiss

Lots more detail here:

[https://www.fide.com/fide/handbook.html?id=18&view=category](https://www.fide.com/fide/handbook.html?id=18&view=category)

------
natch
Maybe they need to consider the idea of better-than-random pairings. What this
means would be a subject for discussion, but for example there could be
heuristics that say something like pairings need to at least look random. What
does that mean? Again, it's a matter for discussion, but just to take the
Yifan situation as the example, seven out of nine paired with the same gender
does not look random. Just saying "it's decided by machines" is not
sufficient. They have to say what the rules are that the machines are going
by, and what is the source of randomness exactly. And then they have to
address the point that maybe pure randomness is not good enough.

------
losteverything
She resigned? Them why make 5 moves?

I would think that if opponent was throwing the game I'd double down and try
to throw it better than her. So the chess match became a chess match. Who can
lose fastest. Then resigning is cowardly.

------
Proven
Why the hell does chess need to be divided by sexes? Ridiculous!

Kudos to her for competing with the best.

------
justintocci
[whatever - i'll go somewhere else]

~~~
draw_down
I am a man, nothing human is alien to me.

~~~
jonathankoren
^^ Poe's law.

------
obstinate
I really didn't like the comments of the tournament GM as quoted in this
article.

> I understand: If I was in her shoes, and I suddenly pulled a draw of six
> girls one after the other, I would say also, 'What is going on here?'

Maybe in the speaker's culture, using the diminutive term "girls" to refer to
professional women in a professional context is considered fine, but it's
definitely grating to me. I'd be willing to give that a pass if that were all.
But he also said:

> I'm sorry for Yifan, because I think she let herself down a little bit
> today.

I really think Yifan is in a better position to judge whether she has let
herself down than Callaghan is. Together these two comments read, to me, as
quite paternalistic and tone deaf. If this is how he's speaking on the record,
one has to wonder if his private attitude contributed to Yifan's decision to
throw the game.

~~~
Waterluvian
If he's not allowed to say that he thinks she let herself down, then you're
not allowed to say you think he's coming off as tone deaf, right? I think that
because there's an issue of gender here, we are scrutinizing every word far
too much.

I agree with him. One thing I learned when growing up playing sports is that
you always do your best when playing. Throwing a fit or protesting by giving
up only lets yourself down. Finish the game, and then go protest.

~~~
obstinate
He's allowed to say whatever he wants, and I'm allowed to feel how I do about
it, and discuss those feelings on this site.

~~~
jonathankoren
But apparently not without being cowardly downvoted for explaining how freedom
of speech works.

