Depasquale on Doeberl

A very loyal Victorian reader sent this in. It's from Chris Depasquale's column in last Saturday's The Age.

A curious incident occurred just before the 6th and penultimate round of the Doeberl Cup at Easter. The pairings for the top couple of boards saw the two Australian GMs , Ian Rogers and Darryl Johansen, scheduled to meet each other, while Igor Goldenberg, co-leader with Johansen at that time, was to play Gareth Charles. The pairings were prepared by a compute program which has the official rules programmed into it, and is widely used around the world.

Rogers protested that the pairings were incorrect. One would have expected that there would be no grounds for upholding such a protest. Even if the program was not officially sanctioned (which it was) it had been used for all the preceeding rounds, as well as previous events. An argument that the programming was faulty and hence produced pairings contrary to the rules would have taken many hours of analysis to test. Yet within 15 minutes the protest was upheld and the pairings changed.

It is disappointing that our top officials can be browbeaten by a top player (and I am sure if the player disputing the pairings was ranked at number 300 in the nation no changes would have been made).

In any event the revised pairings saw Goldenberg playing white against Rogers.

One wonders what might have happened if, after the game, Rogers had protested that the original pairings were correct and the round should be replayed.

So far, Australia's number one has remained silent, even on Australia's favourite bulletin board - Chesschat. Will GM Rogers retaliate?

Our international readers should note that the original pairings cited by Depasquale, Rogers v Johansen, has been firmly established as absolutely correct. NSWCA president and expert on these things, Bill Gletsos, has thoroughly analysed the situation. You can read Bill's analysis here.