Counterintuitive economics of a chess tournament

So, if I'm McShane, do I push when my most likely outcome is draw or loss? That's actually a pretty tough calculation. Nakamura clearly was not going to let him go into the opening line that he wanted to which was going to make the game much more difficult. McShane probably should have pushed for a win since he was going to be at a disadvantage relative to the tiebreakers anyway. However, that's a tough call. Add in some fatigue and taking an easy draw to get past the person ranked second in the world doesn't look that unappealing.

Nakamura, on the other hand, is one of the absolute best players at speed-type chess which is what was going to be the tie-breaker. So, he has a huge incentive to take an easy draw and rest up for where he has a big advantage, and zero incentive to put anything at risk. Nakamura is absolutely not going to let McShane go into his preferred opening when the draw is just fine.

Finally, please do remember that 50%+ of grandmaster games wind up in a draw anyway. So, both of them can decide to press on, waste a lot of energy, and be in the same situation as the nine-move draw anyway.

Given that Nakamura won the whole shebang, it sure looks like he made the right choice.

- They say this is terrible for television, but I bet they love it! I wasn't aware of this tournament until this story. TV tries its best to manufacture strife and drama.

- In Go you simply aren't allowed to repeat a position (ko). I wonder how profoundly it would change chess if you simply weren't allowed threefold repetition. Or if you weren't allowed it within the first x moves?

- What if a draw earned you 0.4 points instead of 0.5? Maybe that doesn't matter with so few games, or does it?

"Across the board" and "overall" seem synonymous to me, I did not mean to imply that men have the advantage in literally every conceivable scenario/dimension.

In this situation I would just tend to err on the side of graciousness and over-correction...men have been calling the shots and having their way with nothing to stop them for so long, for most of us it is impossible to empathize with the challenges faced by the other half. Due to this long legacy there is a tangled web of deep-seated factors contributing to why women might not be competitive with men in chess, and why we might look into ways we can attempt to balance for that. I strongly believe that "just toss them in the ring, no special considerations, because lassiez-faire competition is the best and most fair" totally ignores the larger picture of these issues.

So yes, it is not insane to consider both sides, but in this particular instance - of someone claiming "unfairness" to men because women have their own bracket where it may be "easier" to get a cool title (and you see this argument all over sports) - I find it pretty gauche. It's just the same general issue where people of privilege see no problems because they aren't affected by them, and then label attempts to correct them as "unfair", I guess because of the explicit and intentional nature of the initiative? (Contrasted to the "naturally occurring" or "subconscious" unfairness all over, which I guess is acceptable?)

How does it hurt men, hurt competition, for women to have their own prize? For whatever reasons, women aren't competitive with men (in chess, at this point in time), men are the best, everyone knows that as a given, do we really need to rub it in by forcing them to be ranked alongside men? Is that really preserving some concept of integrity of the sport? Is that helping women get better? Or does it just further discourage them? Obviously some people are fine if women are muscled out of playing chess, if they can't hang that's their problem, right? There I go with the mocking, but agh! Have some compassion, understanding, graciousness...

This has already been answered and I'd like to hear your rebuttal.

It hurts men and competition by devaluing the prizes. To quote jstanley again:

"She's no better than me, but she is a WGM and I am nothing".

Do you see how this hurts competition directly? Like it or not people compete for the recognition which is embodied by the prize. If the prize can now be given out without full attainment of the skill being tested for, then it loses its meaning and its signaling value.

> For whatever reasons, women aren't competitive with men (in chess, at this point in time)

I'd also be curious to hear from you why you think the reasons for this are "whatever reasons" - I'm presuming by that you mean, that the reasons are inconsequential or they don't matter or they are not important. Why do you believe that to be the case, without first knowing what the reasons actually are?

EDIT: all players have their own ELO score but they are still competing for the prize, which is the embodiment of the attainment of certain skills. If women can win this prize without attaining the same skills then this is devaluing the prize. Please address this directly, if you will. Again, to make this clear, players compete for the prize, not for the ELO score. If players did not compete for the prize, there would not be a prize.

I urge you to consider that aggregate statistics are not individual experiences. It is a totally normal, expected outcome that there are individual men who have had deeply unfair experiences based on their gender. The fact that 'overall' men have better experiences will be cold comfort to such people. While in aggregate we tend to encourage men/boys to play chess, and as such there are a lot of competitive men, an individual man/boy may have a very different experience. Telling that one man/boy that overall men have it better in this scenario (and others) just won't be compelling. That's why I tend to argue that we should consider these incentives. It's a group-modification action, not an individual-modification. But understanding this may help you to have compassion for people who, for whatever reason, are blind to the 'tipping of the scales' that you mention.

Good luck.