"help bot" wrote in message
...
On Nov 19, 10:43 am, " wrote:

"As long as we have the goofy system of paying large class prizes we
will have sandbagging. Reward excellence and just maybe there will be
more of it," said an idealistic official, a voice in the wilderness.
--

GM Larry Evans in a chapter about sandbagging in THIS CRAZY WORLD OF
CHESS (page 143),

Coming from a grandmaster, this comes off as
greed. IMO, the top players are already getting
the lion's share of prize money, so grasping for
even more is selfish and worse, it ignores the
inevitable result: less participation overall by the
lowly masses, the peons GM Evans and his ilk
hold in disdain. If arrogance could be replaced
by a sweeter attitude, the result might be more
akin to the work of Zorro, and less like that seen
in a famous quote:

"...let them [the peons] eat cake."

O come on! That is a "Morphy's Shoes" anecdote, based on missunderstanding
of Creole, and Marie's was to misunderstand what she said, which was to give
the people who asked for bread, [cake-] bread. Or simple round loaves.

---

If Evans is 'arrogant' then so is Adorjan, who recently addressed the same
issue with the same sentiment. In fact I had to water down his comments in
order to present them to another GM in a form of question that would be
answered.

But Adorjan certainly asked sardonically if the monied classes in chess also
contained all its genius? He went on to ask if we really thought that if the
top few hundred players were to take part in a 13 round Swiss, that the
finish result would accord to ELO?

At high levels there is no rating floor, but a celebrity class of player,
and just 50 of them earn 95% of available chess money.

To add just one more name, the year before he became world champ [by
something of a fluke] Khalifman of Petersburg said the same - that it was
nigh on impossible to get into that top group, because they rarely played
the level below it.

This sort of 'fixing' is not Soviet, its our capitalistic version, no?

Phil Innes





-- help bot