Softly softly

The best of Aesop’s fables is the one in which the Wind and the Sun compete to remove the coat from a passing man. The Wind goes first, assaulting the man with full force, but the harder it blows, the tighter the man grips his coat. When the Sun takes a turn, it radiates such glorious heat that the man takes off the coat of his own accord.

Similar wisdom might inform an interview with a sporting figure. Forget the Paxmanesque inquisition: prepare some open-ended questions, establish a rapport and listen carefully to the responses. You would probably not strap your subject to a polygraph machine, point a camera at them and pepper them with questions like ‘Have you ever played chess while you were drunk?’ And yet this freakish genre thrives in the upside-down world of online content creation. In the past year, Chess.com has published interviews with various top players and streamers, presumably inspired by a series of interviews with celebs on Vanity Fair’s YouTube channel.

Regardless of the po-faced polygraph operator and ominous background music, nobody actually takes this stuff seriously. Or do they? Last year, I received a bizarre press release from a company representing World Chess, a commercial partner of Fide. World Chess were offering a free lie-detector test to the world’s top 100 players ‘in a move designed to promote transparency and fairness in the sport’. This test, focusing on areas relating to fair play and ethical conduct, was to be administered by the detective agency Pinkerton. Nothing to hide, nothing to fear! The only person I’m aware of who volunteered for this was the former world champion Vladimir Kramnik, whose zealous and indiscriminate campaign against chess cheating has by now implicated so many players, on such flimsy evidence, that his views on the subject have lost all credibility.