On the one hand, this was a pleasingly low-tech con, along the lines of Deflategate, as compared with the sci-fi conspiracies in poker and chess. “We got weights in fish!” the Dickensian-named tournament director, Jason Fischer, announced, after holding an unusually dense walleye caught by the ostensibly winning team, slicing its belly, and withdrawing a lead sinker, to hoots from an angry crowd. Are we all getting paranoid? Unfortunately, the angling tournament on Lake Erie that made international news the other day doesn’t bode well for the sanguine. Sports don’t build character, the saying goes. Merited or not, the level of competitive distrust calls to mind an ex-President who insists that all elections are rigged unless the right person wins. “I wish we could have all just stripped down naked,” she added, echoing the aloof chess rogue. What about the red jewel on her finger that vanished after her hands dropped briefly below the table? “I was twisting my ring, as I always do.” Was that a phone-shaped bulge in her pants? “I was wearing the absolute tightest pants in the absolute smallest size.” Versace leggings. “I was shaking my foot,” she told the podcast “PokerNews,” blaming A.D.H.D. (She later said she regretted doing so.) Her chair, some noticed, appeared to vibrate sporadically, as if zapped. He confronted her-and, strangely, Lew gave him his money back, thereby encouraging a Zapruder-film level of analysis online. Did she somehow know that her opponent, Garrett Adelstein, had bupkes, too? That’s what Adelstein seemed to suspect. At issue is a two-hundred-and-sixty-nine-thousand-dollar hand won recently by Robbi Jade Lew, who had lousy cards. Vibration theory has overtaken professional poker as well. His shoes? His rectum? Niemann offered to play in the nude. On the Internet, speculation proliferated about where Niemann might have stashed a device that could vibrate in a kind of Morse code, offering hints from an associate. “I had the impression that he wasn’t tense or even fully concentrating,” Carlsen said afterward, explaining his refusal to play Niemann again. Louis, when he defeated the world champion, Magnus Carlsen, in front of video cameras. (Reports of academic fraudulence soared during the pandemic.) Niemann admits to having done so twice, when he was twelve and sixteen, but he denies the accusation that he found a way to cheat last month at a live tournament in St. Think of it as cheating on a take-home test. We are stirred because we believe he plays by the rules.ĭoes anyone else? The Wall Street Journal reported last week that the online platform had found more than a hundred instances in which the nineteen-year-old grand master Hans Niemann likely “received illegal assistance” by toggling screens and seeking artificial intelligence-a brain on steroids. They care about the presumption that Judge grew his magnificent body by consuming food, not pharmaceuticals, unlike the slightly less gargantuan men who bested him. Nobody cares about American League records. Judge’s total was the American League record, we kept hearing, because the men who out-swatted him all happened to play for National League teams, never mind that interleague play has long since made the distinction arbitrary. With just one more game remaining before the start of the playoffs, Aaron Judge, one of the largest players to bat lead-off in baseball’s long history, launched a moon shot for his sixty-second home run of the season, climbing into seventh place in the annals. Top of the first, 1–1 count, hanging slider: all rise.
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