2002-09-06 - 11:31 p.m.

What is Fair?

For the last few days what I've been about is uploading the games recently played at the New York State Championship. There definitely seems to be a record number of them, which is good news for chess fans, bad news for me. Oh well.

Because of the way things have to be done, unfortunately the games are, sort of, arranged in reverse order to how interesting they are. Because it needs to be done first, I do all the games from the Open section, then the Under-2,000 section then the Under-1800 section, and so on. What this means is that as I go on the rating of the players gets lower and lower, and the games get worse and worse.

Except for a little peculiarity. Earlier today I was inputting the games from the Under-1,600/Unrated section. The way the tournament organizers set it up, no person without a U.S. chess rating could play in any section lower than this one. Of course if an unrated person wanted to they could play in any section ABOVE this one, but this is the lowest one they could play in. And what was the result? Of the top four places in this section, three of them were taken by unrated players. There were three players with 5-1, and two of them, Roberto Beltran and Francisco Rojas, were unrated. The person who came in fourth with 4 1/2 - 1 1/2 was also unrated.

So, what's the big deal? Well, just because someone is unrated in the United States doesn't mean that they are unrated everywhere. It seems that both Rojas and Beltran are strong junior players from Latin America. Rojas scored 5 1/2 out of nine points in the Pan-American Under 18 championship in 2001, while Beltran scored 3 1/2 out of nine in the Under 16 championship.

How to I know that? Because I looked them up in my database. What made me do that was the fact that both of them had turned in their games and they CLEARLY outclassed the rest of the section. Both of them played some very solid, error-free chess. In contrast, there were some REAL unrateds in that section, and I saw some of THEIR games too. When the position gets complicated, they seem to lose a piece every move.

So, is it fair for these two guys, who are semi-pro in their native Latin America, to enter an unrated section in the United States? Well, that depends on what your definition of fair is, and how much you care. I should also point out that the amount of money an unrated player could win was limited to $200 and the top prize in the section was $700. Might this have had something to do with the fact that Rojas beat Beltran in the final round, even though the latter was previously undefeated? I don't know. Beltran was only going to get $200 if he won the game or lost it. However, I looked at the game and it seems genuine.

Technically both these guys were unrated, but they definitely weren't novices.

Than again, there's another issue.

At the end of the tournament, while I was waiting for the final result, I overheard two of the grandmasters talking, and they were griping the grandmaster's usual gripe. Namely that at these tournaments with class sections there were relatively weak amateurs winning large prizes, but a Grandmaster or and International Master who is playing in the Open section and is not a front runner get chump change, if he gets anything at all. Is it fair for guys who devote their lives to the game to walk away with nothing while some class players get a sizable percentage of what the person who wins the whole tournament gets?

I don't know if fairness is really the issue so much as the economic realities of running a modern tournament. Back in the old days, a lot of the famous grandmaster tournaments had "Major" and "Minor" sections where amateurs competed for modest prizes. Obviously the players back then didn't mind that the majority of their entry fees went to pay the prizes of the professionals. Today, on the other hand, players apparently want more value for their money - they want a chance for a big prize too. They couldn't care less that a famous grandmaster was playing in the next room.

Is any of this fair? Who knows? But this particular economic reality is making being a chess master, literally, its own reward. In this country it's practically impossible to make a living playing chess.