some competitions and players simply do not exist. At least that’s the claim of one person posting at Red Hot Pawn.
As another poster pointed out, in the introduction to Dynamic Chess Strategy Mihai Suba tells of a student tournament in 1967 where he was the only person to show up. Suba needed a norm to become a second category player. He goes on to explain that the arbiter gave him the names of some of the other entrants and told him to produce some plausible games. So he copied some games out of a book about Alekhine and came second, in a tournament where he was the only entrant and Tahl wrote about helping people to get norms in his autobiography.
The original poster believes the GM title should be awarded only to those players who have qualified for the World Championship Candidates and he lists 97 players who have done so. This number is a far cry from the 1300 plus GMs in the world today. Of course, FIDE has always allowed wheeling and dealing when handing out GM titles.
Several years ago, The Week in Chess uncovered a fake tournament held in Chernobyl and as far back as 2006, FIDE tried to clamp down on fake events.
Related:
Dr. Mark Ginsburg – rating manipulation
New York Times article on rating manipulation
Chessbase articles on cheating
According to the FIDE website, there are 1,446 GMs in the world.
ReplyDeleteI counted them the other week. Out of the millions and millions of people in the world who play, not a lot!