When a player loses his confidence.

Ref: Here.

Or worse.

“Chess is the art of analysis” - Mikhail Botvinnik

MSS season is back and I see "arbiter" Marcus Yeoh publicly attacking player NM Evan Capel on facebook. Corruption he cries, just like BN election he says. Now how did he come to this conclusion? One is an individual and the other is a system.

Note: This is important to understand by virtue that an arbiter is supposed to dispense justice fairly to all.

I think we need to analyse this carefully. Question. When a player loses his confidence, is it the same as when a system loses it's confidence? Lets analyse more critically.

Chess is an extremely competitive sport played out in the full glare of public viewing. Your thinking is exposed on the board so it is hard to lie to those who know how to analyse.

Now lets understand this. There is nobody in this world that is born with an innate ability to take extremely high pressures. They do not pop into this world with the temperament, character and knowledge to beat Kasparov.

That ability has to be carefully nurtured. So you will expect slips and falls. You will expect to see failure in courage from time to time till they are seasoned enough, old enough.

So we can have 2 situations.

One is when courage fails without premediatation. This will occur in any and every player thoughout their entire career as they bridge new and higher levels. In that case we counsel and we guide because we know that is the nature of the beast.

And on the other hand we have arranged games. Players who find old games to win or draw, hoping to avoid detection....players who play tag team by losing to team members to push someone nominated ahead. That is premeditated. Now this is a more serious offence.

The job of the arbiters then is to detect and prevent this happening in tournaments and deal with the different situations with the correct weightage.

But this is now the second case of arbiters publicly attacking named players that I have seen recently. The other one was arbiter Najib who said he would have banned those he calls "cheaters" in the 2010 NJ.

Now it seems to me that these arbiters make no mention of the corruption in the system. The abuses of power by officials. They try to keep the focus on the players. Why? Is it to deflect from their own corruption?

For comparison lets look at what happens when the system loses it's confidence in my next post. And then we try to analyse which is the greater evil.