Forbidden pairings

Put yourself in the shoes of Aryan Gholami, the teenage master from Iran who was paired with an Israeli opponent in Sweden in January 2019. It’s a blitz tournament, so you’re due to begin in minutes. For political reasons, your country expects that you will refuse to play the game, and there may be repercussions if you do play it. Gholami duly forfeited the game. His ‘virtue’ of omission was celebrated back in Iran, where he was photographed with Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and General Qasem Soleimani (the latter was killed in a drone strike earlier this year).

Recent years have seen a spate of incidents in which Iranian players boycotted their games with Israelis. It is a paradox that this regrettable practice attests to a flourishing chess scene in Iran. The current generation includes Alireza Firouzja and Parham Maghsoodloo, the 2018 world junior champion. These young players, and many more, are active on the European tournament circuit, so it is no surprise that they encounter players from Israel, a country with a strong chess tradition.

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Fide, the international governing body, turned a blind eye for many years. ‘Forbidden’ tournament pairings were rare, and could be averted with an arbiter’s sleight of hand. But fiddling pairings is a non-starter in knockout events, while forfeited games affect other participants too. A high-profile dispute is only a matter of time. And the situation damages the prospects of Iranian players, whose federation cancelled their participation in some events where such pairings were likely. That was unacceptable for Firouzja, who now lives in France and plays under Fide’s flag.

The Iranian chess federation appears to endorse the boycotts in domestic media. In June, Fide president Arkady Dvorkovich formally requested them to clarify their position, pointing out that discrimination (of all forms) directly contravenes the Fide charter.