Hou Yifan plays the Fool's mate. Resigns after move 5 in 2017 Gibraltar Masters.

Following twitter links, saw a link to a youtube video with Hou Yifan giving an interview after the game:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsV4Pf-1U0s&feature=youtu.be

Why wouldn't it be accidental? Ketevan Arakhamia-Grant played six women. Throwing a game because you would have preferred to be paired with other opponents is very strange. She can't expect to pick her opponents by herself, and why on earth would anyone stop her from playing men by tampering with the pairings? She must have a very low opinion of the organisers.

The art of trolling is saying dumb things in a believable way. You have to be a little more subtle to be believable.

Kacper Piorun, who entered the tournament with the exact same rating as her has only played 2 women. And up until this round, they both had 6 points. Considering how small the field of women are, and how much lower rated they are than Yifan, I think she has legitimate reason to protest.

Pairings are based on how many points the players have, not ratings. So for example someone who has won two games and lost 1 (total of 2 points) may be paired with a player who has won 1 and drawn 2 (total of 2 points).

Also, at least at first the pairings are done by a computer program. In the USCF I know the TDs have a lot of leeway to change the program's pairings, but as I understand it, in FIDE they're a lot more restricted. For example FIDE could punish the arbiter(s) if it's obvious they altered the pairing in ways that weren't allowed. So if she isn't involving FIDE, it suggests to me that there was no illegal pairing manipulation.

How pairing works in the Swiss system.

I'm not saying it's rigged. I just see it from her perspective. In the first round, either of them could have played Atousa, and it went to Yifan. And from there on she's played over 3 times as many women as her male counterpart. Computers are doing the pairings. But there's nothing stopping an organizer from switching an opponent. That's probably what she thinks is going on. Either way it's a smarter way to protest than just walking out. This way they either work it out so she's playing men, or her stance becomes more and more valid for every woman she plays, regardless of whether or not a computer is doing the pairing.

But if she's felt like she hasn't been taken seriously as a female chess player, then of course she's gonna call bulls--- when she ends up playing 7 in a mostly male tournament.

This is new. Women think of themselves as inferior to men for the first time, want to play men more, think of it as a disgrace if they're paired against other women. Talk about feminism.

What else does it mean? Yifan is not upset because her opponents were underrated (they were not btw), she's upset because her opponents were all female despite their rating. This is a clear example of reverse feminism, surprisingly exhibited by a female.

No, I understand how it works. I'm just saying if this was a protest, then she's already claiming there's corruption. So how the system works in an official capacity isn't really relevant. It's like explaining how computer voting system works in a debate alleging voter fraud. I think she's saying either the computer is rigged to favor female-female matchups or someone switched what the computer handed out. This is all of course reliant on if this was a protest, and I'm not entirely convinced it was.

Interesting discussion though. Thank you for posting.

The pairing rules are pretty complex though. It's not that everyone with 2 points has equal chance to play everyone else with 2 points. One thing it tries to equalize for example is color. So if you've had more blacks than whites, your next game is more likely to be against someone who is due to have black.

The game. I was sure this was another lame troll thread, but ...

Nigel would be proud of you.

The pairing rules are available for anyone to check whether or not it was just bad luck.
https://www.fide.com/fide/handbook.html?id=18&view=category

No way am I reading through it though. Way too tedious. Maybe someone, or Yifan herself, will point out exactly what was wrong other than she disliked the gender of most of her opponents.

Why exactly didn't she want to play girls?

I don't think she has a problem with playing females. I think it all just comes down to her feeling like it's too much of a coincidence that she's played 7 women so far.

Not necessarily. Many men on this site have a problem with the women-specific titles, tournaments, etc. But they don't have a problem with playing women. Dropping out of the Women's Championship Cycle agrees with her alleged issue in this tournament. She doesn't want to play women just because she's a woman. I think she's probably jaded by the entire women's only cycle and that has led, in part, to her believing this tournament is rigged in the same way. She left the WCC to not get special treatment for just being a woman. And now she feels she's still being treated like a woman first, chess player second. Whether those feelings are valid, I don't know. I don't see the reason to pair her against other women on purpose.

I think she's saying, regardless of her opponent's ratings, that the pairings were unfairly manipulated, and the reason she suspects it just happens to be that most of her opponents were female. Presumably if her pairings had been manipulated in the different way, she'd be just as upset.

I haven't looked at FIDE pairing alogorithms but in the USCF, color isn't really looked at until after the first pass. You may end up with a transposition of players when it comes to color allocation like that if both players that should be paired together based on score group and rating order (top half vs bottom half) have the exact same due color and both have the same, or very similar color history.

But yeah, it should be trivial, for anyone familiar with the pairing rules, to see if something more nefarious was going on or if the pairings she got were really the best ones that could be achieved by the rules.

I'm sorry if I made you mad, you need to learn to control your emotions.

If she had beaten all the girls, she would have been paired against Hikaru and the top players. After all it's a swiss open.