"help bot" wrote in message
...

Personally, I don't put any trust in what the many
talking heads /say/ happened, on account of very
annoying facts like:

a) After accusing players they don't like of cheating,
admitting somewhere else their own misdeeds in the
very same vein; this is titanic hypocrisy.

b) Many of these chronic complainers share a similar
background, as haters of the status-quo who moved
abroad; we never hear the other side of the story from
the FIDE-bashing hack writers, because they don't
/want/ it heard.

This is an interesting admission. Is anyone actually on the record with the
opinion that there was /not/ Soviet fixing?

Otherwise it seems that Corn-bot has eliminated all evidence, by those who
stayed in Russia and those who left, and all who reported them by any means.
Even Smyslov only denied his /own/ complicity.

c) Every Mickey Mouse conspiracy theory I have yet
seen fails miserably to account for the strength of
GM Botvinnik's moves! Even if all of his opponents
were throwing every game, this still requires a logical
explanation, since there was not yet any Fritz.

Corn-bot has failed to quite understand Taimanov's commentary, which is not
very subtle! And as Kosteniuk recently pointed out to us, Fritz recently
couldn't solve a mate in 2.

d) Western players, supposedly immune to threats
from the evil KGB, also had poor results against GM
Botvinnik, while doing considerably better against the
other Soviet players. (Again, conspiracy theorists
have nothing but embarrassed silence.)

It seems as if one must be a conspiracy theorist to contest the rest of
this, or alternatively put down the level of Botvinnik's play. I haven't
seen evidence of anyone doing either.

e) GM Botvinnik drew Bobby Fischer. Once again,
the room falls silent (and angry). Blind luck?

? he lost to Keene, what does that mean? Too narrow an anecdote to draw
conclusion from?

f) Every story is based on what somebody thinks or
on what somebody says they were told;

untrue, many stories are testimony, are direct witness to events - and for
heaven's sake, at least 4 of those have been mentioned here - what we make
of those things are susceptible to spin, or uncertain conclusion on them,
but is this a challenge to the witnesses themselves? a little bit of
Stalin-denial?

obviously,
no self-respecting hack writer would resort to that if
he could dredge up substantive evidence; it is only
when the hacks are incapable of finding anything
substantive that they report "sightings" of Kong,
interview people who /say/ they saw footprints, etc.,
instead of capturing the creature and bringing him
back to New York alive, so we can go and see him
in person (an excellent idea, if I do say so myself).

no sir. many things were not reported in the West, about the West or the
East because people did not want to look. Now there is little excuse in
looking, still there is reserve, as if we want to protect ourselves against
something - but what?

Phil Innes


-- help bot