Laos Round-Robins

[Phil Makepeace]

Just had a quick flick through the England top 100 in the new January 2010 FIDE rating list and I came across Andrew Baxton (68th), Robin David (74th=) and Paul-Alexander Martins (79th=). All of these individuals have initial ratings of over 2300 from APA tournaments in Laos in recent months. It all looks a bit dodgy to me - am I right in this assumption?

[Sean Hewitt]

You certainly are right Phil. I'd say that all of these are events are totally ficticious.

None of these English players appear in the ECF grading database, nor have they ever done so it seems.

Two of the three have surnames that are also first names - that's quite common when non-English speakers make up English names. Just look at the names used on spam emails.

A quick look at one of the players Asang Lao-Thamavong reveals that he played in a total of 5 round robin tournaments in Laos during Nov/Dec playing a staggering 68 games and losing 198 rating points!!!

An even closer look tells us that he played in a 17 player (yep, 17 players) all play all starting 6 Dec. This would require 17 rounds and at 3 games per day that's 9 days. Yet he played in another round robin starting just 7 days later on 13 Dec.

Come on!

[John Moore]

Complete nonsense - Laos should at least have hired some ageing titled players to make it look plausible

[James Coleman]

Mr Thamavong scores quite reasonably with White, with 11 wins to his 14 losses and 17 draws. It's his Black repertoire that is clearly letting him down.

[LozCooper]

Just had a quick flick through the England top 100 in the new January 2010 FIDE rating list and I came across Andrew Baxton (68th), Robin David (74th=) and Paul-Alexander Martins (79th=). All of these individuals have initial ratings of over 2300 from APA tournaments in Laos in recent months. It all looks a bit dodgy to me - am I right in this assumption?

A bit dodgy is an understatement! I've passed on the info to our rating officer and the ECF board and clearly FIDE need to do some investigating.

[Sean Hewitt]

I've emailed FIDE so that they can look into the matter.

Meanwhile, I'm waiting for the three new English FMs to turn up at the Uxbridge International!

[LozCooper]

I've emailed FIDE so that they can look into the matter.

Meanwhile, I'm waiting for the three new English FMs to turn up at the Uxbridge International!

Thanks. I've also e-mailed our new FIDE delegate

[Sean Hewitt]

I've just had an email from FIDEs chairman of the ratings committee and he has told me that they are now unrating all of the Laos round robins.

The new English FMs are therefore no more!

[J T Melsom]

It's good to see that this has been partially resolved though it remains to be seen what further action FIDE will take against the perpetrators. Perhaps a more fundamental concern is that these issues were revealed by Phil's casual inspection of the data rather than by any quality control at the FIDE end. Given that a fee is normally paid for FIDE services, one might have expected some sort of value added verification process , based on for example high levels of activity, new high performing players , incomplete personal details (No date of birth) etc. Or is it simply the case that FIDE is only interested in collecting the fees not maintaining the integrity of the system? I'm playng a tough APA at Uxbridge next month - Laos looks a better option.

[Alex Holowczak]

This raises an interesting question. Suppose a league official submits results of games that didn't happen. He could just make up a few dozen games, and the grades will radically change as a result. Then suppose the people that were picked on aren't members of the ECF. They'll never be able to see their results, and as a result, never be able to complain. In a long list of League results, it might just look like more matches in the League, say a friendly, or something. By withholding the data (I.e. a list of game results) from non-members, isn't the system open to this potential abuse?

[Leonard Barden]

Laos is a weaker version of the Myanmar scam of around 15 years back. Then chess officials in the former Burma, with just a few genuinely Fide-rated players, hit on the idea of Scheveningen events where unrated names scored massively against the rated players and thus emerged with 2200-2300 Fide. By further adoption of this pyramid principle, a group of 2400-2500 players was created. All so far were paper tournaments, but then they organised a GM event with some complicit non-Burmese titleholders and got their top players GM norms. At the peak of the scam the top Myanmar player was 2600 and 'improving' at such a rate that he would have surpassed Kasparov and Karpov within a year. After widespread protests, Fide belatedly acted by docking the Burmese 100 points and forbidding the Scheveningen-style events. Further action was promised but did not occur, and as a result the Burmese ratings remained hyper-inflated. The top guy got a place in a genuine GM event where he was duly crushed. Eventually the Burmese generals replaced the scam organiser and Myanmar returned to its former state as a chess backwater.

[IM Jack Rudd]

The fun thing about this scam is that if you start it off right, you only need to run it *once*. You could do it with your local club: find four rated players and the six weakest players, and rig things so the latter six all win against the former four in every game. Then you have six really weak players with really high ratings.

You then put some of those six players into a ten-player all-play-all with some players who are genuinely slightly better than them. Repeat as often as necessary; the result is that you get a lot of inflated ratings with only one rigged tournament.

[Carl Gorka]

Just had a quick flick through the England top 100 in the new January 2010 FIDE rating list and I came across Andrew Baxton (68th), Robin David (74th=) and Paul-Alexander Martins (79th=). All of these individuals have initial ratings of over 2300 from APA tournaments in Laos in recent months. It all looks a bit dodgy to me - am I right in this assumption?

We had the same thing here in Australia. The Levinstone's showed up on the Aus listings and have even contacted the ACF to apply for their norms

ACF FIDE-ratings officer, Greg Canfell put the following on an Australian Chess forum:

http://www.chesschat.org/showpost.php?p ... stcount=14

[Sean Hewitt]

So they are trying to make their "foreign" players into titled players - no doubt the 3 English players would have applied for their FM titles via the ECF.

Had they been successful in doing this, they could then have started to have all play alls for IM and GM norms.

Interestingly, Laos has no FIDE rated players - apart from those who 'played' in these recent events!

[Stewart Reuben]

I don't know when first Mikko Markkula became aware of the problem. But he reacted almost immediately to Sean's email.

The ECF requires all players rated as ECF be members of the federation. It is a pity we did not collect those fees before they left the list!

A Schevenigen System with more than one unrated player is always liable to this problem. That is why FIDE banned them from being rated a substantial number of years ago.Laos administrators had clearly failed to purchase a more recent edition of my 'Chess Organiser's Handbook - so it served them right!

The manipulation does not work with round robins as the games played against unrated players counts for the rated players. Mikko and I tried to introduce a similar system for Swisses, starting from 1 July 2009, but the FIDE Presidential Board overturned the decision of the General Assembly. It is entirely possible that Mikko and I had not yet got the technology right for this.

Once ratings have been established for some time it is very difficult to reduce them. Mikko and Nick Faulks tried hard to adjust the Myanmar Ratings down in 2008, but were thwarted. The reason it became of interest again is that the players had become active. I was very ueasy about a decision being taken concerning Myanmar when they had nobody to represent their interests in Dresden.

The FIDE Ethics Commision has far more teeth than it used to have. This is substantially because of the make-up of the members. However, as you can imagine, it moves rather ponderously. First it must decide whether the matter should come before them. Then they must take depositions from the interested parties. Then they must make a decision whether to uphold the complaint. Then, if upheld, what penalties, if any, to impose. The transgressor has the right of appeal to the Lausanne Courts.

Stewart Reuben