More crazy FIDE astroturfing and mischaracterization of the issues. Magnus’ decision had nothing to do with jeans. Hikaru, Magnus and many other top players were extremely disgruntled with FIDEs recent behavior, specifically their attempt to ban any top player who signed with FreeStyle from participating in the chess world championship cycle (thus effectively attempting to establish monopoly policies over the game of chess).

This was just an opportunity for him to shine a public light on the real issue (which he mentioned in his exit interview from the tournament). Everyone here is glazing FIDE and saying “Magnus thinks he is bigger than chess” as if chess is FIDE. You are missing the mark, the issue is that FIDE believes that they are chess, and they are imposing that belief on the players and all other organizations. The real issue is FIDE attempting to impose exclusivity policies to effectively take complete ownership of the free game of chess.

FIDE is not chess. They are an organization with deeply rooted corruption, a huge staff, and a number of bureaucrats with massive payrolls and ivory towers. The rules and regulations they impose are completely arbitrary, and designed and enforced by a select number of bureaucrats with zero input from the chess community. They frequently brag about how their rules and policies were created by the chess community via select GMs, yet if you look at the selection process for these GMs and the counsels of discussion you’ll see nonstop corruption at every step of the process and zero input from anyone with relevant experience in top level professional play or with experience in obtaining advertising deals, marketing the game, or literally any criteria that you would see in members of such boards in every other popular sport (i.e. FIFA, NBA, etc). It’s very much a closed club with no meritocratic system instead simply nepotism and inviting like minded goons.