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BGonline.org Forums
lynch law in Chicago?
Posted By: Colin Owen In Response To: lynch law in Chicago? (Michel Lamote)
Date: Thursday, 9 June 2016, at 12:45 a.m.
You say that you consider the "ruling a corruption of what sports is about", and then go on to give a couple of examples as to how sports participants wouldn't behave. (The boxing one: for sure, ko the guy. The marathon one: you have to run your own race. Anyway, helping him up and along to the finish could well get him disqualified - remember the case of Dorando Pietri in the 1908 Olympics?)
Firstly then: bg ain't no sport; it's 'merely' a game. Secondly, different sports (and games) really do vary enormously in their prevailing ethos. Take soccer. If the ball grazes your shin just before going out of play, you would act as though it didn't, claiming the throw in, corner or goal kick; this is practically automatic for players, ie to lie. If you can stop a likely goal by fouling the opponent, or handling the ball, then you may be expected to do so by your team, even if you receive a caution or are expelled from the field. And if you knew that the ball went over the line for a goal against your team, and you appealed to the referee to allow it - particularly when he might not otherwise have done - then you could look forward to a world of pain provided by your team mates, manager, billionaire club owner and many fans - and for an indefinite period.
Contrast this highly dishonest culture with that of snooker. There, if you knew you had made a foul shot by barely touching a ball with your arm when trying to play a shot - something that the referee conceivably might not have noticed - then you would automatically call the foul shot yourself. This is the norm.
As you say, in chess you're not expected to point out to an opponent that he is about to run out of time. But bg is not chess. We don't play in the same live and let die atmosphere as that truly noble pursuit. It may well give us less claim to be a true mind sport, but it might also make us more human from a layman's perspective. By choosing to say nothing about your opponents actions, which included multiple dice rolls within the same 'turn', and being happy to win on time largely as a consequence of him not getting multiple delay increments, you weren't following the ethos that generally prevails in our particular game.
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