> Why would smart people care about denim vs. trousers?
Mostly it's about the sponsors. It's much more difficult to get sponsors for an event if the participants are dressed like they slept in their clothes. That's why organizers try to impose minimal standards on dresscodes.
Jeans and sneakers are maybe debatable, but players showed up with cargo pants, shorts or tank tops on other events.
In the FIDE regulation for that event jeans were explicitly mentioned as not allowed. FIDE would have made a fool out of themselves when allowing Magnus to wear the jeans.
Not sure I agree. Chess has moved towards a much younger audience over the last 5 years, and is incredibly popular now. Gets 10s of thousands of viewers on Twitch, for example & there are many players that could be seen as modern day celebrities in their own right.
FIDE needs to embrace the younger generation that think the game is cool. Ancient dress codes are a distraction.
Not only still. It increasingly belongs to old people. Old people have capital, young people salaries. Capital has grown faster than salaries for a while, and ai should make the difference even bigger.
There’s quite a difference between casual clothes and dressing indecently. IMO jeans are fine as long as they’re inconspicuous (such as raggy jeans with holes in them or worn in such a way that the buttocks are showing) for such an event. Swimsuits are for a different type of event where if you’re showing up in trousers they would disqualify you.
Other environments manage more casual dress codes without too much difficulty. I can’t wear a swimsuit to the office but I can wear jeans. No-one seems especially confused about where the line is.
Having never read any formal dress code rules for any office, hospital, or place of worship I've been inside in my life, I've never gotten kicked out for wearing the wrong thing, and I've also never seen someone wearing a swimsuit in any of those places. This isn't some uniquely problem that only chess tournaments have, and it's not nearly as hard to solve as you're making it out to be.
> It's much more difficult to get sponsors for an event if the participants are dressed like they slept in their clothes.
Anyone who considers jeans to look like "clothes someone would sleep in" is immediately dubious in my book. Jeans are so extraordinarily uncomfortable to sleep in that I don't think I've ever intentionally done that in my life.
Many jeans today are not the stiff and sturdy work clothes they used to be. They have the appearance of it, but are actually made of a relatively thin, stretchy fabric that is more comfortable, and much less durable.
It seems rather harder to get sponsors when you can no longer attract the best player in the world to your tournaments. That they made much more of a fool out of themselves by holding "world championships" without attracting the undisputed best player in the world to them.
This looks to me like a case where FIDE got greedy and forgot to balance the talents interests with the sponsors.
> Mostly it's about the sponsors. It's much more difficult to get sponsors for an event if the participants are dressed like they slept in their clothes.
Would be interesting if they can get mattress companies or apparel companies that have good comfy clothes as sponsors. Why not play chess on a firm mattress?
We'll see how easy it gets to get them when Magnus is playing at some parallel tournament, though. Nakamura, for instance, has already made a point about that.
id think the venue more than the sponsors. the media sponsor being the norway public broadcast to specifically put magnus on tv means theyve ticked off at least one sponsor by disqualifying him
> Why would smart people care about denim vs. trousers?
Prescriptive contest rules suck, but I don’t like the attitude endemic to nerds that truly smart people don’t care about personal aesthetic. There’s no more honor in not caring how you look than there is in not caring about food or fine art. I have friends that are smart, capable professionals that look like they only get new clothes when their mom notices their shirts exceed the totinos pizza roll stain threshold and drags them to Bob’s— whether it’s at home, work, wedding, date night, court, the gym, the club, a con, etc. You’d expect them to reject people’s tendency to judge people on their looks, but ironically, they deem anyone that puts any effort into their appearance (a.k.a. doesn’t solely dress for comfort) shallow, unintelligent, and boring. Predictably, gender expectations play a huge part.
> I don’t like the attitude endemic to nerds that truly smart people don’t care about personal aesthetic.
Then IMO you should be on Magnus' side here. He is a truly smart person and IMO he looked clean, groomed, and ready for business in those jeans. He wears a mindfully put together outfit of good quality. This is good character, is it not?
It's a shibboleth for ugly people; since they can't "win" on their looks, they opt not to play that game at all and need to loudly brag about their superiority over the vapid "fashion police".
It's a shibboleth for poor and dumb people; they don't have anything going for them (maybe they are not ugly but that doesn't help anymore after a certain age), so they need to play dress up to appear more than they are (and ever will be) and act like it too. Always funny to see.
Why wouldn't smart people care about appearances? If the organization and participants desire to present themselves as dignified and worthy of respect, a certain standard of dress is appropriate.
More generally, appearances are important because they are clear signs of attention and care. Something worth our respect is worth dressing up for, and a collective dressing up reinforces the importance and elevation of a given event or moment over other events or moments of lesser import.
Times have changed. Offices used to be full of people in full suits, with trousers. Now it is common for CEOs to wear jeans, and offices are much more tailored to working comfortably, rather than having a "posh" facade.
It doesn't really matter, regardless of whether or not we agree with the rules, jeans are clearly prohibited in the tournament:
4.10.1.3. No players with t-shirts, jeans, shorts,
sneakers, baseball caps or inappropriate dress are allowed
in the playing area. Any requests to wear national or
traditional dress shall be approved by FIDE Supervisor.
Having bad rules written down doesn't make them immune to criticism. It's a silly unnecessary rule that shouldn't exist, and while Carlsen doesn't deserve any special treatment, being consistent in enforcing a bad rule isn't better than not having the rule in the first place.
Most sports have dress codes. Some for obvious reasons, such as team sports where the players need to be able to identify each other, but others because they want things to look professional and more organised.
Take a sport like rowing. Technically there's no reason why all the rowers in a boat needs to be dressed identically, but it looks more professional.
Chess to me is boring because the better player should win/draw unless they blunder. And we (generally) know who the better player is because of ratings.
I’ve always much preferred games that in the short run have a luck component that can create massive swings (poker, backgammon, Scrabble) and inequality.
Memorizing openings is a waste of time unless/until you have a shot at good enough to make a living playing chess - about 1000 people and most of them live in poor countries where cost of living means they don't need to earn much to live.
Not really. there is some but a lot of it is how this pattern looks in different places on the board. You never see a text book endgame so you have to see how to win no matter where the pieces hapyen to be.
It’s funny because that’s partly what this a LOT about. FIDE, the defacto governing body of chess, wants freestyle chess (aka 960 aka Fischer random, which does lot to fix the memory issue you’re talking about) to not be allowed to have a “world championship”.
And that attitude led us to these honestly inane events.
Basketball is a game for tall people. Lifting is a sport for strong people. Chess is a game for smart people. Is that controversial or incompatible with 5 year old kids playing chess?
Because smart people realize that all associations and organizations have rules and showing strangers that you follow the rules is an easy way to signal across languages and cultures that you are all there for the same reason
Chess itself is a collection of very arbitrary rules.
They happen to be rules that people decided are fun, or interesting, or something. If the dress code isn't fun they should change it.
And for that matter... this tournament is a blitz game, itself a change of rules. Perhaps it would be well suited to a change in dress code. Formal clothes for classic chess. Show up in your PJs for a game that takes as long as brushing your teeth.
On the womens’ side, the biggest FIDE sponsor is breast enhancement surgery. That makes women’s choice of shirts important for the sponsor’s marketing. Maybe these rules are trying to signal that the attention is spread across men as well.
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Why would smart people care about denim vs. trousers?
Let competitors wear pajamas- it makes no difference.