Thread by @KrisAtLarge

#chess fans might remember Claude Bloodgood, a chess master and *convicted murderer*. he murdered his mother in 1969 (so far as I know this is not disputed, although I can't find any details about the crime) and got a capital sentence in 1970, later reduced to a life term.

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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Bl…

#chess mavens may know Bloodgood because he was an advocate of Grob's Attack, a questionable but tricky flank opening: 1. g4, which inflicts an open wound on the first player's Kingside in exchange for some tactical complications. it's not...good.

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it's for "club play", as they say—i.e. it's the sort of trick you pull against a weak player in a low-stakes game, hoping that they'll fall for some trappy sideline.

anyway, Claude Bloodgood was a fan; he wrote a book about it, "The Tactical Grob": houseofstaunton.com/the-tactical-g…

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but I'll tell you why I best remember Claude Bloodgood: he showed that #chess rating systems were a joke.

it's possible to "game the system" by isolating a group of players and having them all play each other and nobody else. and what better isolation exists but *prison*?

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while in prison Bloodgood organized #chess contests and managed to get his prison-mates membership in the United States Chess Federation (@USChess), in which Bloodgood was himself a member.

he was able to inflate his own rating at the expense of other prisoners' ratings.

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for a while Claude Bloodgood was the second highest rated player in the UCSF below Gata Kamsky, who was credible world champion material for a while. eventually @USChess punished Bloodgood, arbitrarily knocking his rating down (i.e. they broke their own rules for ratings.)

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and supposedly they took measures against that sort of ratings-gaming using an isolated pool of players. I rather wonder what they were...

...especially considering that all professional #chess maintains an artificially isolated pool of players, i.e. all the *men*.

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#chess is segregated by binary gender (or "biological sex", I suppose a right-wing bıgot would say) for no clear reasons aside from a general presumption—the sort of presumption it's taboo to discuss too openly—that women are intrinsically weak chess players.

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as with #sports, the world of #chess is divided into two unequal halves. the big half is men's chess, which gets all the press coverage and most of the money—it's "real chess", just like men's sports are "real sports" while women's sports are a smaller affair, a specialty.

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the elite men of #chess all get to play each other, and only occasionally does a woman get admitted into an elite tournament. the isolation of men into a protected and privileged subcategory of chess players is not unlike Claude Bloodgood's prison chess-club.

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it isn't just that the men are kept separate from the women; it's also the fact that elite players, "supergrandmasters" as they've been called—folks like GM @MagnusCarlsen and GM @FabianoCaruana—mostly play each other, with only occasional competition against nobodies.

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these elite players get the invitations to big tournaments, all the prize money, all the publicity; everyone else is shut out. and they all get to score #Elo points off each other...

...rather like Claude Bloodgood in prison eh?

(@ID_AA_Carmack, you take Elo seriously?)

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(you don't have to answer that, Mr. Carmack.)

~Chara of Pnictogen

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