Is this "startegy" unethical in chess
sorry if i wrote too much and if this post could have been shorter
Tl;dr at the bottom
So heres the situation.
There are chess competitions starting next week in our school and our team (team red) has finalized the 4 players for the match. (we have doen this by conducting a in house trail of all red house members). Here red is our house colour which every student gets randomly and there are a total of four houses in our school. We are against team green in the first match. it is basically a semi final, loser gets knocked out and the winner plays the winner of blue vs yellow.
Now the problem is the board 1 of green team is really strong, he has been winning the individual tournament from the past 2 years and our board 1 says that its next to impossible for him to beat team green board 1. our teams board 2 (me) has never played team greens board 2 but our board 1 guy says that on a good day he may beat team greens board 2. our teams board 1 guy says that i can easily beat team greens board 3 as that is his cousin. our captain (B1) knows the chess scene at our school better than any one of us and told us that our board 3 can easily beat team greens board 4.
heres where the "startegy " or bluff if one can say, comes in. What if we switched all our boards one step lower and make our b4 play their b1. If we dont do this then our captain says that he will loose his match for sure , and if he can arely beat their b2 guy i also wont stand a chance against him. even if our b3 and b4 win its going to be a tie and winner will be decide by b1 vs b1 rematch.
but with lowering board number by 1 . their b1 will win against our b4 (that game is going to go to their team anyway). but our captain playing on b2 has a chance in his game and myslef now on b3 and the b3 guy now on b4 will get 2 points (guaranteed according to our captain) . now it comes to the board 2 , if our captain wins we go through, if he loses then b1(which was our b4) vs b1 match we are definately going to lose,we lose the match. This new seeting has a chance of us winning depending on our captains match whereas without this we are definately going out.
This was initially suggested by me as i think that if our captain has a chance of winning against their b2 he should play on b2. our team has been discussing it since.
Is this lowering of board number not allowed or unethical. has it been done at top level team games?
Their team's captain knows all of our players level and is going to call us out. What do you all think?
(b stands for board here)
Tl;dr. if we give our board 1 board 2, our board 2 board 3, our board 3 board 4 , and our board 4 board 1, we have a chance of winning the match. if we dont do this we are going to lose 100% percent. should we do it?
Posted Nov 19, 2022, 3:48 PM UTC
I mean. The Soviets didn't put an Active World Champion as Board 1 quite often. And Fischer wasn't Board 1 in the USSR vs the World Match. So.... it's pretty standard to play the match ups rather than boards being arranged purely on rating.
Every time an active soviet world champion played in an olympiad, they played on board 1. (Of course they didn't play in every round, and sometimes the world champion didn't turn up to the olympiad at all, but that isn't the same as switching up the ordering.) If there is an exception or something I'm missing I'd be interested to know.
This was not related to matchups though. They were going to do by rating, and Fischer was going to be board 1, but Larsen complained that it was unfair because Fischer had been inactive while Larsen had recently been doing very well, even if he hadn't surpassed Fischer in rating. Fischer decided to concede in that discussion to Larsen (a quite humble and easy solution when you consider Fischer's personality in general).
Rating in general was also a bit of a new thing, so that also contributed to Larsen's argument.