Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Sauce for the Nosher


Nosher, complaining about arbiters in the latest New In Chess:
In fairness, even the finest arbiters will occasionally make misjudgements, but serial incompetency ought to be eliminated. The problem is that currently, short of committing downright fraud - such as submitting fake tournament tables - no one is ever going to be stripped of his IA title, regardless of how bad it may be.
How does that differ from the Grandmaster title?


[Nosher index]

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

Don't really understand the comparison. The only people affected by Grandmasters demonstrating "serial incompetence" are the Grandmasters themselves.

Richard

ejh said...

I don't really understand the problem. Nosher's complaint is that they can't lose the title when he's in possession of a title which cannot be lost.

ejh said...

As far as incompetence is concerned, I have all sorts of problems with Nigel's views on the subject, but one of them is that I'd like a different implict definition of incompetence than "taking a different view of a dispute to that expressed by Nigel Short".

Jon H said...

Well said EJH. These things need to be aired - Short is truly a fantastic chess player, but time and again he shows that he has rather unpleasant character flaws. Many Short apologists seem to think that the former means the latter should be blithely accepted. I don't.

Anonymous said...

If an arbiter keeps making bad errors then there should perhaps be some process to remove them. Same with any type of referee or judge.

Anonymous said...

I see he brings up the Isle of Man incident again. This was where following usual British practice (with which he should have been familiar), he was told that he would be re-paired as a result of a round one no-show. I suppose this was arbiter incompetence of a sort, that collectively they had never ensured that this standard UK practice is supported by the FIDE Handbook.

Was Nigel totally unaware of re-pairing conventions? It seems unlikely because they were around in his youth in British Swiss events. Or was he just picking a fight for the sake of it?

ejh said...

Well, in re: the Isle of Man incident, I've written a letter to New in Chess about it, as I was playing in that tournament, and I'll see if it gets published before I say anything more.

In re: arbiters, I did of course get Richard's point, and I should perhaps have said so rather than replying snarkily. Apologies. Thing is, if an arbiter is generally considered incompetent (as opposed to having crossed Nosher) then there are various steps you can take. There are Appeals Committees. Letters, closed and open, can be written complaing about them and if enough people are dissatisfied, then perhaps next time a different arbiter will be in charge.

(Then again, there's not a huge supply of arbiters, and perhaps among the reasons are that it's not easy, you don't get rich doing it and arbiters get as much or more grief off grandmasters as grandmasters get off arbiters.)

But why take titles off people? I don't see the need. And if we're going to do that, then why not apply it to other FIDE-awarded titles?

Anonymous said...

You have a point about chess player titles; How about 3 "un-norms" and you're back to IM.etc
That'd make them work a bit harder.

ejh said...

Well maybe, but it'd be a bit rough on them when they got into their sixties.

Niall said...

Different game, being a GM or an arbiter. If a GM's crap, no-one suffers but herself. If an arbiter's crap, players suffer. Although I doubt constantly crap arbiters will keep getting the gigs if they're crap, and besides, for most of them it a passion, and it's hard to be crap at something one's passionate about. Except playing chess, oddly enough!