605 million reasons not to believe what you read in Wired

Jonathan draws our attention to this piece from Wired a few days ago, in which the author, as well as being perhaps the only person on the planet who thinks that Spassky beat Fischer

(an error which to their credit they have now corrected)

also appears to believe that the planet contains many hundreds of millions more chess players than is intrinsically likely.

Maybe she was unwise enough to read Dylan Loeb McClain - or, more likely, and even more unwise, to believe what Ilya Merenzon told her.

A shame actually, as the piece contains some interesting quotes, not least from everybody's favourite bully Nigel Short, having a characteristic hissy fit because he didn't get what he wanted

"Incredibly stupid." No fence-mending there from Nigel, who now appears to believe that the Russian Government doesn't interfere in chess politics

President Putin has better things to do than to be involved with chess.

I wonder how long Nigel has held this view? My guess would be from the precise moment he was offered a Vice-Presidency by the former Deputy Prime Minister of Russia.

It has to be pretty recent, anyway, since in June he was describing the same former Deputy Prime Minister of Russia as

basically, an agent of the Russian government

whose role was to exert

Russian soft power, to allow them to control this body in perpetuity.

What an immense hypocrite and bully the man is. Always will be.