Fishy Fish, Messy Chess and Poker J'accuse: Sports scandals take a turn

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This week, finally!-sports fans stopped indulging in trivial hobbies like the NFL and Major League Baseball and started caring about the three most important things in American life:

Or rather: cheating scandals in fishing, chess and poker.

Let’s start with fish. A video of a Lake Erie fishing contest over the weekend has gone viral in which anglers are accused of supplementing their winning walleyes with lead and fillets. apart from Walleyes.

That’s right: Wally at Wally.

The cheating fish was caught on camera and there was a lot of drama: The fish that was given to Baige to look after looked suspiciously like an egg weight and slime filters. The people nearby are angry and look like a mob.

“We have a weight of fish!” – shouts the organizer.

“Get Blanka out of here!” another voice shouted. (He didn’t say empty. Note, if you haven’t seen it yet: The Wally video is worse than Scorsese’s Pesci.)

Now, if you’re like me, you think of fishing as a leisurely activity where you can’t catch anything in between opening 12-ounce cans. But Lake Erie was the big time: a five-figure prize was up for grabs. The suspects were hot on the heels of the lucrative tournament, which is now under suspicion.

I didn’t have it The world-famous Lake Erie fishing imbroglio On my sports lineup card for October. I didn’t expect the most-read sports saga in the magazine this month, and to be honest, it could end up taking a decade — the cheating scandal that’s currently engulfing the world of high-level chess.

If you’re behind (but you shouldn’t be, because this story was written by the magazine’s editors. Andrew Beaton & Joshua Robinsonnow the Woodward and Bernstein of chess): This dilemma applies to American phenom Hans Mock Niemann, who last month unexpectedly toppled world champion Magnus Carlsen.

In the next match, Carlsen retired after one move, stating that he did not believe Niemann’s game was up to his level. On Tuesday, Woodward & Bernstein, aka Beaton & Robinson, said an investigation by online chess platform Chess.com found more than 100 instances of Niemann’s questionable online play, and Niemann admitted to the allegations and was banned. a period. The report also raised serious doubts about Niemann’s meteoric rise to chess “over the board” (ie playing live chess in the same room as an opponent like Carlsen).

Now, if you’re like me, you think of chess as a leisurely exercise where you lose to kids and golden retrievers in between opening 12-ounce cans. But this chess scandal is a big story and raises a fair question: How do you cheat at chess?

There are many options for cheating online (answers are often a click away from Google), but Beaton & Robinson note that off-board cheating is a more complex endeavor, with a live feed of the match and almost certainly a co-conspirator running. Computer selections and signals are transmitted to the player via some device.

Or not? There is no hard evidence, and Niemann has vehemently denied cheating in the extra games. The same obscurity and lack of evidence applies to poker player Robbie Jade Lew, who was scrutinized for walking into a $269,000 pot against Garrett Adelstein holding a jack. It’s a special call you might not want to play in the backyard against your cousins and some golden retrievers, a wild move in the professional realm. Suspect Adelstein was furious and Lew (who denied cheating) returned the money to him.

Now, if you’re anything like me, you think of poker as a leisurely activity where you lose at most two figures between opening 12-ounce cans. A quarter million dollar pot sounds like a stressful, stomach-churning business to anyone, so God invented penny slots and Uno.

It’s been a week of fooling around, and a few more days of my favorite sport, professional cycling. Do you know what pro cycling calls this sort of mess? They call it “Pro cycling”. (When your sport involves hidden motors and athletes injecting other people’s blood, crudely stuffing a lead-filled fish inside sounds amazing.)

Still, these revelations involve the imagination, as we wonder what some of our fellow travelers will go to in order to win. How fitting that these Hurricanes hit 62 the same week PED-scandalized Yankees slugger Aaron Judge turned 62?

(There is now talk of a legal scandal in the Irish dance world. I don’t know what to do with this information.)

I choose to be optimistic. Watching people get upset over this controversy made me feel that there are still a few places left in this cruel world where something as faded but useful as human integrity is important—even if those places are Yankee records, chessboards, poker tables, and onboard motors. . Fishing boats on Lake Erie. This is the reason why Magnus Carlsen is so celebrated. That’s why prize fishermen are asked to take a lie detector test. That’s why, whether you like it or not, the Houston Astros are going to hear garbage can jokes for the rest of their lives.

Good faith is needed here, I say. Truth still matters. Fishing, chess, and poker sound like the perfect summer weekend in Maine. Let’s stay that way.