FIND THE QUOTE YOURSELF

It's in this very thread.

David Kane falsely claimed the rematch clause is no advantage to
the champion.

Quote him, then. What's that-- you haven't got a
quote of DK saying that? Hmmm.

help bot wrote:
On Apr 26, 2:08 pm, " wrote:

David Kane falsely claimed the rematch clause is no advantage to
the champion.

Quote him, then. What's that-- you haven't got a
quote of DK saying that? Hmmm.


But here is what Mikhail Tal wrote after losing the title back to
Mikhail Botvinnik, who exercised the clause in 1961: "I often have to
answer a ticklish question: what do you think of return matches? As it
happened the honour of 'closing this page of the FIDE' fell to my lot.
What would it have cost the International Chess Federation to take
the decision to abolish return matches a year earlier?!"

Now Greg overlooks that an even number of rounds in a Swiss does
NOT mean equal colors for everyone. If two leaders both have 3 whites
and 2 blacks going into the last round of a six-round Swiss, one of
them will end up with 4 whites and 2 blacks.

Interesting. Of course, nearly every Swiss tournament
I have played in had fewer than six rounds. The main
problem is with the weekend Swiss of five rounds (that's
three on Saturday, and two on Sunday), where at the end,
the winner may have had an extra White and the losers
might complain of having been jilted.

Now that pairings are done by computer, the cases in
which somebody gets too many Blacks cannot so easily
be blamed on the tournament director or on favoritism. I
think players who have had a bye or who are in the lower
portion of the scoring table will be the most likely victims
here. Folks who have a perfect score tend to get their
due colors (unless they've changed the rules, again).

But let's talk about Mikhail Tal's issues for a moment.
We know that in addition to the rematch he lost to GM
Botvinnik, he was also subjected to the special rule
which restricted the number of qualifiers from "any one
country" (obviously meaning the USSR); that rule was
passed due to complaints regarding potential collusion
in the candidates tournament format-- complaints by
Bobby Fischer (which incidentally, wrongly implicated
Victor Kortchnoi as a cheater who purportedly "threw"
his games to keep BF from winning). Obviously, when
politics enter the fray, fairness goes out the window.

I am flatly against having a rematch clause. If one
cycle every three years is not good enough, then they
can change the cycle to make it "fit" in less time. The
champion should have no advantage whatsoever, or,
if that is not possible, then his advantage should be
limited to not having to qualify (again) and play in the
preliminary events, to show he is good enough to be
a "real contender".

I don't know which hurt Mikhail Tal more-- the rematch
clause, the special rule or losing a kidney. But the real
problem seems to be that the talking heads in the
chess press can't stand it when there are a multitude
of near-equals in contention for the title; they respond
by selecting one favorite, and then attacking everybody
else. Or the other way around-- they select one player
to play the villain, and everybody else is written into the
script as the good guys. LOL!

Larry Evans' approach has consistently been to cast
Gary Kasparov as a good guy, but this choice was not
well thought-out (consider his blatant cheating, and his
ever-changing lies). And one of the most obvious
problems with casting Mr. Botvinnik as villain, is that
he consistently defeated those players who were
beyond the reach of evil Soviet henchmen who were
cast in the roles of manipulators. For instance, when
the script calls for super-Soviet players to "throw" their
games, we are not supposed to notice that at the very
same time, western super-stars are also losing to MB,
simply being *outplayed* on the chess board.

Not to pick on Larry Evans, mind you; I notice this
same type of flaw in many, many movie and TV
scripts. It seems that the one thing all these story
writers have in common is, unsurprisingly, creativity;
and for whatever reason, creativity and logical thinking
just do not go hand-in-hand.


-- help bot