No prizes

Online piece in the Telegraph about the FIDE election. Hurrah! That looks interesting...

...until it turns out to be one of their Premium pieces, which means that unless you're registered it fades out after a couple of paragraphs.

What a cliffhanger!

Do you know, I registered just to find out who it was.

And what a disappointment. Unfortunately, although the piece continues

These include hosting FIDE delegates on junkets at the World Cup and Russian embassies directly contacting chess federations to sway votes

it doesn't actually go so far as to give any specific allegations or name any actual names. No prizes for guessing? No prizes for journalism, either.

Now a couple of things about this piece. Well, maybe four.

The first is, if you're going to run a piece about iffiness in an election, maybe don't accidentally forget to mention that one of your own correspondents is on one of the election slates. It kind of looks bad, Malcolm.

The second is, I remember allegations of vote-buying from the last Presidential elections, and the most egregious offender was Garry Kasparov, which doesn't quite fit the narrative of the Telegraph piece. Or, come to that, most pieces I see on related subjects.

Third is, if you're going to run a caption saying Bobby Fischer at the World Chess Championship during the activity's heyday, try not to use a photo of Fischer at a sanctions-busting non-championship match in 1992, because it not only looks like you don't know what you're doing, but what with the US sanctions list being a theme of the piece, it's an amusingly bad error to make.

Fourth is this.

Do me a favour. Have a word, eh Malc?