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In Just 5 Moves, Grandmaster Loses and Leaves Chess World Aghast
- zzleeper 10y agoIt would be good to know the chances for that. I'm guessing most of the other participants at each round were men, so they must have been pretty low...
- obstinate 10y agoI really didn't like the comments of the tournament GM as quoted in this article. > I understand: If I was in her shoes, and I suddenly pulled a draw of six girls one after the other, I would say also, 'What is going on here?' Maybe in the speaker's culture, using the diminutive term "girls" to refer to professional women in a professional context is considered fine, but it's definitely grating to me. I'd be willing to give that a pass if that were all. But he also said: > I'm sorry for Yifan, because I think she let herself down a little bit today. I really think Yifan is in a better position to judge whether she has let herself down than Callaghan is. Together these two comments read, to me, as quite paternalistic and tone deaf. If this is how he's speaking on the record, one has to wonder if his private attitude contributed to Yifan's decision to throw the game.
- throwaway91111 10y agoFWIW I hear it too.
- dexterdog 10y agoWell she is supposed to be the best woman in the world by far yet the top 100 in the world are all men. She probably feels she should be competing mostly against men so she can get shots at those above her and move up.
- timmytokyo 10y agoAgreed. You don't hear him referring to the male participants as "boys". This type of sexist language, while probably not intentional on the part of the speaker, is one of the reasons women struggle to be taken seriously in so many professional contexts.
- true_religion 10y agoMight it not be that men are referred to as 'boys' regularly in certain contexts but it is simply not remarked upon because there is no historical discrimination against men?
- ianai 10y agoI agree. Does he also call the men, "boys"? Probably not. Not that it matters whether he does as that's still diminishing and dismissive. It's also really insulting how he said she let herself down. She lived up to her beliefs and he should acknowledge that. Instead he invalidated her choices.
- xxs 10y agoHe's British - it's not "boys" but lads.
- kwhitefoot 10y agoThat rather depends on context, age, where he grew up, to whom and about what he is speaking, etc.
- Waterluvian 10y agoIf he's not allowed to say that he thinks she let herself down, then you're not allowed to say you think he's coming off as tone deaf, right? I think that because there's an issue of gender here, we are scrutinizing every word far too much. I agree with him. One thing I learned when growing up playing sports is that you always do your best when playing. Throwing a fit or protesting by giving up only lets yourself down. Finish the game, and then go protest.
- obstinate 10y agoHe's allowed to say whatever he wants, and I'm allowed to feel how I do about it, and discuss those feelings on this site.
- jonathankoren 10y agoBut apparently not without being cowardly downvoted for explaining how freedom of speech works.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- mmanfrin 10y agoOne person is speaking to the press about a protest to the event he organized; another person is commenting on the tone-deafness of the comment. Holding the latter to the scrutiny of the former and claiming that the latter is 'not allowed to say' what he said is an exceptionally absurd -- and frankly stupid -- argument.
- glitcher 10y agoThese are valid points, and important to call out this kind of language given the history of sexism. Side note: One of my biggest frustrations on HN is seeing a comment downvoted without any counterargument given, as with this one. Would any downvoters care to voice their opinions?
- jonathankoren 10y agoHear hear. Downvotes to substantive comments all too often are simple "You made my feelz cry." Or In this case "Fuck you SJW, you made my feelz cry."
- hkmurakami 10y agoWhen I read your excerpt, I immediately wondered if he is British. Turns out he is, and I believe this language is pretty common in their culture, at least traditionally. I do not know whether women in he U.K. are bothered by such comments esp if the man is much older than them, as is the case here. As for commenting on letting herself down, well he is a TV commentator. You hear this sort of being said by TV commentators in basically every sport.
- obstinate 10y agoAll too true what you say about TV commentators.
- mmanfrin 10y agoI am really disappointed with HN that you are being downvoted. I read the article and came away with the same impressions -- that the use of the word 'girls' and the 'I think she let herself down' comes off as exceedingly patronizing. You have made a clear argument with your comment and others have downvoted you because they disagree with you, which is not what the downvote button is for.
- throwaway91111 10y agoWhy are tournaments (or rankings; it's hard to tell from the article) sexed in the first place?
- obstinate 10y agoI believe, but am not sure, that the tournament and ratings are both non-gendered. But one can look at the list of rated players and observe who the top rated woman is on that list.
- lultimouomo 10y ago> [Hou] recently left the women's chess circuit for mixed events where she can compete against men It looks from the article like there is indeed a women-only circuit.
- obstinate 10y agoAh yes. That does not surprise me. I thought that the person I was responding to was asking about this tournament specifically.
- sdenton4 10y agoThey talk in the article about how she worked to get OUT of gendered tournaments. This one isn't gendered, but it seems that there's a ghettoization of women in chess that she's working against.
- mynameishere 10y agoghettoization I'm pretty sure they set up female tournaments in order to encourage women to develop interest and skill in the game. But, no good deed unpunished.
- maxxxxx 10y agoIn chess this makes no sense. I can see that in other sports women are physically at a disadvantage but chess?
- zxcvvcxz 10y agoQuestion: isn't the drawing of opponents dependent on relative ratings? If so then it probably makes sense that more of one population would match with each other, assuming there are significant statistical differences in the populations. For Chess, this is most certainly the case (top 100 is almost all male iirc).
- dnljms 10y agoShe's the top ranked woman. If that was the case, she'd be playing mostly against men.
- zxcvvcxz 10y agoRegardless, the only way to know if it was a statistically fair setup is to have: 1) the rankings of all playings in the tournament, and 2) the algorithm used to match players. If 2) matches players of similar ratings against eachother, and she is more similar in rating to women than men, then I don't see what the fuss is all about.
- georgeoliver 10y agoNot only on relative ratings, but on your performance in the tournament as well.
- slyall 10y agoThere are pretty strong rules about how the draw on FIDE tournaments can be done and the programs that make them have to be certified. In one forum someone said they actually checked: ---- I see a lot of remarks saying "well, let them show the machine, so someone can check it", "It must be manipulated, this is so unlikely", etc. The FIDE Swiss Dutch rules are on the FIDE website, in the handbook. There is pairings.fide.com which has a list of endorsed pairing software, meaning it was tested by FIDE to follow those rules. Why is nobody doing the checks? Guess what? I did :) Took the SwissManager tournament file from chess-results.com, created a TRF / FIDE rating report file, imported it, verified the pairings. Round 1: differences, which is to be expected: people show up late, ratings get corrected, mistakes fixed, etc. Round 2, 3, 4: equal to the pairing in Gibraltar Round 5: a few differences in the group of people with 1.5 and 1 out of 4, nowhere near Hou. My educated guess: results of previous rounds were corrected after round 5 was paired Round 6, 7, 8: equal to pairing in Gibraltar Round 9: in the lower echelons 2 pairings were adjusted (the black players exchanged), due to (probably) Israeli not playing Iranian Round 10: equal to pairing in Gibraltar. Does that count as sticking to the facts?
- ianai 10y agoWithout those modifications does she wind up playing against fewer women?
- stonesixone 10y agoIf people agree that the software was correct but that the pairings were poor, there is always the possibility of reevaluating the algorithm itself. For example, an algorithm could be chosen that results in more "mixing."
- dsacco 10y agoYou can only optimize an algorithm in so many dimensions. Without making this a debate about affirmative action, I'd like to point out that if you're designing an algorithm to optimize for raw skill comparison in tournament match-ups, optimizing it to rebalance match-up results to be more mixed essentially voids that first optimization. In the aggregate, you're producing very different results by doing that. To put it simply, would you rather have skill-based fairness in a tournament or gender-based fairness? You can design the algorithm in such a way that your priors are mistaken, or bias creeps in (though theoretically that can be self-corrected). But assuming that's not the case, and the algorithm correctly matches up mostly women v. women and men v. men in a skill parity optimization, you have a fair result for the purpose of a tournemant; i.e. skill-based match-ups. If at that point you have an issue with the match ups for reasons of gender or ethnic parity, I would argue that you should seek to correct the upstream issues, not the algorithm. In other words, try to get more women playing chess - make the sport appeal to them more, make it more inclusive, etc. Rebalancing an algorithm is, in my view, a handicap, whether it's applied to gender disparity or any other disparity. I feel it does a disservice to both parties and doesn't really solve the root issue.
- justintocci 10y ago[whatever - i'll go somewhere else]
- draw_down 10y agoI am a man, nothing human is alien to me.
- jonathankoren 10y ago^^ Poe's law.
- glitcher 10y agoA downvote without a counterargument is not conducive to open discussion and debate. I can understand this behavior when comments are particularly egregious in some obvious way, but in this case please do contribute to the conversation by explaining your take on the commenter's opinion.
- qzervaas 10y agoWho are you going to report the anomaly to when you flip a coin 10 heads in a row, and what is a satisfactory resolution?
- rm999 10y agoThere's some good discussion in this reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/5rm88g/hou_yifan_resigns_after_5_moves_in_the_2017 https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/5rm88g/hou_yifan_res.... As someone who does statistics for a living and used to play tournament chess, a few of my disorganized opinions/thoughts: * There's no conclusive evidence that her pairings were tampered with, and the pairings are in line with what seeds someone would be given by a computer. The probability of her playing that many women is very low, but the whole point of randomness is rare events happen (as humans we're very good at detecting patterns in randomness). Her accusations are plausible but not a given. * I think her goal to break down the barriers of gendered chess is great. The chess world needs more women, and if there were more they would be completely competitive with men. She's fighting a good fight. * One of the reasons I stopped playing chess is the egos. This one was relatively mild, but purposefully losing games is wrong, even if done in protest. Once you sit down at the chessboard and shake the other person's hand, you're agreeing to a good game. Throwing a game against a woman because you're grumpy she's a woman is not a good thing. * But, her activist tactic worked, here we are talking about it.
- gjkood 10y ago> Throwing a game against a woman because you're grumpy she's a woman is not a good thing. Not to be pedantic, but Lalith Babu, the Indian Grand Master, is male. I believe the article says Hou Yifan threw the final match against Lalith Babu. She played all the women pairings till she got there. Not to mention how the winner of that match would feel with such a terrible victory.
- rm999 10y agoNot pedantic at all, thanks for the correction!
- _yosefk 10y agoA guy playing very shitty chess here. * Not sure if pro chess needs more women, men or computers spending their energy on it. I guess stuff like this is its own reward but being good at it comes at a price and competition guarantees that this price will be the highest people can possibly pay. I guess it should be kept legal but I don't see why encourage it. * Judith Polgar, who ranked #10 among humans and #1 among women, had a crazy dad set out to prove that "any child can be raised to become a genius." Here I use "crazy" in colloquial terms but AFAIK men are more likely to experience mental illness in professional terms. * Could it be that fewer women are crazy enough to devote their lives to chess than men? Is it really a problem? The societal benefits of chess are not obviously worth the opportunity cost, as someone with a potential as a chess player could probably do something most of us consider more productive. None of this is in response to TFA (and I wish Hou Yifan success in everything she does), I'm only replying to your point about women being as "good" as men at competing at an inherently unproductive mental activity.
- facepalm 10y agoMisleading headline: she threw the match to protest against the tournament setup, having to play against too many women.
- natch 10y agoMaybe they need to consider the idea of better-than-random pairings. What this means would be a subject for discussion, but for example there could be heuristics that say something like pairings need to at least look random. What does that mean? Again, it's a matter for discussion, but just to take the Yifan situation as the example, seven out of nine paired with the same gender does not look random. Just saying "it's decided by machines" is not sufficient. They have to say what the rules are that the machines are going by, and what is the source of randomness exactly. And then they have to address the point that maybe pure randomness is not good enough.
- DavidWanjiru 10y agoI don't follow chess, and I didn't know it's gendered. That doesn't make sense. Why would chess contests be gendered? That's like a gendered photography contest.
- Odin78 10y agoAs the article states, the top 100 chess players in the world are male. The field is incredibly male-dominated and even though women and men should be equal, the reasoning between splitting it tournaments by gender is that women would otherwise get discouraged.
- jdietrich 10y agoIt's not strictly gendered - women are free to enter any tournament and hold any title. There are a number of women-only tournaments and titles, purely to improve the visibility of women in the game. Without women-only tournaments, you'd see very few women at major events. Only one woman has ever qualified for the world championships (Judit Polgar in 2005). Hou Yifan is the best female player in the world, but she's ranked 105th overall. The second highest ranked female player is 303rd. Gendered tournaments aren't ideal, but the alternative is worse. Most countries do a dismal job of promoting female participation in chess, with China being a notable exception. Western women just aren't being encouraged to take up the game and aren't made to feel welcome when they try.
- rshm 10y agoWhat additional value does the ranked pool bring compared to random pool for pairing. Game pairing in Go for example is usually a random pool (bingo; pick your number from a bowl), after that it is straightforward knockout.
- ekun 10y agoFrom loosely following chess over the past year it seems they normally play a random pool and whoever has the best score at the end wins the tournament.
- slyall 10y agoNo that isn't the case. There are really only two common types of tournaments. A round-robin will see each player play every other player once but this is limited to small fields (10 is the usual limit). For big fields like the one the article is about the Swiss System is used. Each player gets 1 for a win, half a point for a draw and zero for a loss. Players are mostly paired against those who are on the same score each round. I say "mostly" since there are all sorts of rules to decide the exact pairings. Chess tournaments will use Dutch-Swiss or sometimes Dubov-Swiss Lots more detail here: https://www.fide.com/fide/handbook.html?id=18&view=category https://www.fide.com/fide/handbook.html?id=18&view=category
- gjkood 10y ago> Hou, who currently outpaces the second-ranked female player by 68 points, recently left the women's chess circuit for mixed events where she can compete against men, who fill every spot in the world's top 100 rankings. I was curious if the women player's ratings were separated from the Top 100 players rankings and thought that the overall FIDE Top 100 ratings was gender differentiated. On a perusal of the FIDE rankings over the years I noticed that that is not the case. Here are the stats for this year (Feb 2017): -------------------------------------------- Top 100 Players: Rank; Name; FIDE Rating 1; Carlsen, Magnus; 2838 ... 100; Artemlev, Vladislav; 2655 101; Cordova, Emilio; 2655 Top 100 Women Players: Rank; Name; FIDE Rating 1; Hou, Yifan; 2651 Here are the stats for the earliest reported year (2000): --------------------------------------------------------- Top 100 Players: Rank; Name; FIDE Rating 1; Kasparov, Garry; 2849 ... 32; Polgar, Judith; 2656 ... 100; Fominyih, Alexander; 2594 Top 100 Women Players: Rank; Name; FIDE Rating 1; Polgar, Judith; 2656 So even though there is a separate Women Players ranking provided, the Top 100 Players is not gender differentiated. It just happens that this year, Hou, Yifan, the current top women player is ranked lower than the bottom of the Top 100 players ranking hence the top 100 payers (this year) is all men. What does that mean? Does that mean that women players do not get a chance to play among men? Are there less opportunities for mixed events? If so, yes that should definitely be changed.
- sulam 10y agoIgnoring the match itself, the commenters seem incredibly sexist. They repeatedly ignored/interrupted a woman saying she'd actually talked to the player to comment on whether or not the player was 'mental' or 'still drunk' or otherwise.
- zakk 10y agoWhat you describe is being rude and bad-mannered. Being rude to a woman is not automatically being sexist.
- brainfire 10y agoTalking over a woman who is speaking for herself, and discussing whether she is competent without her input, is a classically sexist way to be rude.
- zakk 10y agoNo, it's not, someone is simply rude and talks over everyone. A rude person will talk over men, women (without being sexist), black people (without being racist), etc. Either you demonstrate that the arrogance is specifically targeted towards women and because they are women, or you cannot speak of sexism.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- sulam 10y agoWhen you defer to men and interrupt women, it's sexist. They were talking amongst themselves and ignoring the woman there, who happened to have actually spoken with the player.
- Kiro 10y agoI don't understand how it was a loss? http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1860931 http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1860931
- Davidp00 10y agoShe resigned
- georgeoliver 10y agoWhat I find interesting and am curious about people's thoughts on here is that while Yifan could have waited until she was able to run the pairing algorithm herself (as someone did see the comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13568108 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13568108), her protest could be no less valid even though it's based on apparently inaccurate information.
- Proven 10y agoWhy the hell does chess need to be divided by sexes? Ridiculous! Kudos to her for competing with the best.
- losteverything 10y agoShe resigned? Them why make 5 moves? I would think that if opponent was throwing the game I'd double down and try to throw it better than her. So the chess match became a chess match. Who can lose fastest. Then resigning is cowardly.
- vivekd 10y agoI was just reading a book about this, "The undoing project". The point of the book was that statically even distribution only works in large numbers, in small numbers its normal to get uneven distributions like this. That's why sample size is so important in scientific research. So, for example, when have a group of 10 men and 10 women, and you randomly pair them up in a tournament, it is normal and possible for a woman to be playing against 5 women in a row. It's not an aberration because small numbers won't necessarily even out. However, when you get a group of 1000 men and 1000 women, and start paring them up for tournament matches, it would still be possible for a woman to end up playing against 5 woman in a row, but on the whole when taking all 500 matches she plays, it should approach 50, the aberration would be if she had played against 500 women in a row. That would be an indication of something suspicious. This is an example of the gambler's fallacy. https://onlinecourses.science.psu.edu/stat100/node/46 https://onlinecourses.science.psu.edu/stat100/node/46
- ManlyBread 10y agoSo she was nowhere near as good as the men who participated in the tournament and rage quit because she had to play against women? Isn't that pretty sexist on her part?