InfinityChess General Manager:
GM Arno Nickel
GM Arno Nickel
Dear Mr. Frayer:
Only now (Dec 8th) I saw your report about the InfinityChess Freestyle Tournament on your website (Nov 18th). Unfortunately your report is misleading in some points and drawing a more negative picture as would have been appropriate.
1) First, you should have mentioned that the application used for the tournament was a beta version, updated shortly before the tournament. All players knew about that, before the tournament got started. I as the TD, same as others, had no experience with this version. Of course, did I expect less problems with the software, otherwise I wouldn’t have agreed to perform this event.
All I could do after it turned out, that the software wasn’t ready for the tournament, was either canceling the tournament (that would have been the easiest choice for me) or trying to improvise to the benefit of the players and the server. I decided for the second option, and you should know that all players who stayed there till the end (14 of 16) proved very grateful for the way I did my job.
2) Taking into account the resulting difficulties, it was not possible and wouldn’t have been fair to decide on all conflicts as if we had a proper application and e.g. disconnected players (by fault of the server) losing their games, if these games could not be resumed automatically. Actually, in some cases we managed to find solutions and agreements for interrupted games, and also, if it turned out to be necessary to give the full point to one of the players, I was glad to see sensible insight from both of the players.
3) Regarding your interrupted game with Kevin Plant, you correctly describe that it was your decision to withdraw from the tournament, before a decision was taken. You did neither accept a) further tries to resume the game, nor b) getting the full point by approval of Kevin and me, nor the draw offer from Kevin’s side. You simply left the tournament without any attempt to solve the situation.
In particular, I am very disappointed to read the following allegations:
4) “However, I did get the distinct impression the Arno Nickel was happy to see me go. His convenient lapse in understanding English as well as his not making a decision in a timely fashion convinced me of this.”
5) “Later, after I saw the tournaments final results I realized there were many irregularities in the way the points where awarded. Just to give one example The final tour results have (Yurisolo) playing me in the eighth round, he wins with the black peaces. lol Perhaps some one played for me the same way some one played for my second round opponent.”
The final table leaves no doubt about “forfeit” results which are quite normal in case of withdrawals, and the almost complete database, recovered in some hours of work (also provided by me) may also prove that we all just tried to do our best and be fair to everyone.
I hope, you will agree to publish this as my comments on your website.
Kind Regards A r n o N i c k e l
(General Manager)
1 comment:
Interesting case... interruptions are a real problem in freestyle chess, there may be many reasons to this. Interesting chess blog!
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