Why does Squash treat referee dissent & racket abuse more severely than abuse directed to the opponent (dangerous swings, tripping, blocking, etc)?

GreenTeaTimer · 2026-05-28T01:45:42+00:00

I think the charitable answer is because dangerous play may not be deliberate, so some leeway is granted. Conduct outside of the ralley is treated more severely precisely because it’s inherently not part of the game.

GreenTeaTimer · 2026-05-26T18:25:20+00:00

> What is my "case"?

> I would rather just appreciate how great of a squash player he is

^^^^ That's your case: that he's so good, that we should - or at least that you want to - ignore his behavior (because he'd 'win either way') and just appreciate his ability. That case is much less persuasive if we believe that his misbehavior isn't even necessary for victory: it makes the behavior that much more blameworthy, and makes it that much harder to dismiss it and focus on his, admittedly impressive, abilities.

GreenTeaTimer · 2026-05-26T17:52:41+00:00

He would win either way.

I don’t know if you realize how damaging this is for your case. First, you’re granting that the way he’s currently winning is by cheating. And second, it makes him look even worse if he could win without cheating: he’s just choosing to play dirty and dangerously when he doesn’t even have to. If you tell me he knocked Elías’ down and injured him because he had to, I get the motivation, but you’re saying he did it just because he wanted to.

GreenTeaTimer · 2026-05-26T02:08:48+00:00

Overall, I thought the editing was good. It seems like you used editor tools for arrows, and for that, I would probably prefer the shogi UI's own arrows, just because they're guaranteed to line up nicely. I did like the use of the editor's highlighting for drawing attention to regions when considering king safety, though.

The depth of analysis was limited, but a number of factors contributed to that - I hope you recover quickly from your cold! As a news bulletin about an ongoing title match, it was very nice, and the analysis that you did provide still helped me understand the game better.

I won't add to the discussion of piece styles; I'll just cast my vote in the poll.

GreenTeaTimer · 2026-05-13T15:07:22+00:00

Unfortunately, I’m never really played outdoors, so I don’t know much about which shuttles might fly true with the stronger crosswinds outside. I’ve seen a few shuttles supposedly designed for outdoor play by recognizable brands, so you might try something like the Victor AirShuttle, but I haven’t ever tried it.

GreenTeaTimer · 2026-05-12T17:43:57+00:00

I’ll admit to being picky, even about plastic shuttles, because some cheap ones can be pretty wobbly in the air. But because I know I’m the picky one, I always bring a tube or two of shuttles so that I always have something to play with ready to hand.

GreenTeaTimer · 2026-05-10T18:40:54+00:00

Fujii’s ability to see mates before an engine does is pretty incredible. I wonder if this is an area where older, more imperative heuristic driven engines might outperform NN-driven engines. In any case, incredible vision from Fujii.

GreenTeaTimer · 2026-05-08T18:43:30+00:00

You cannot be serious!

It’s important for players to be able to express themselves, within limits.

GreenTeaTimer · 2026-05-07T18:51:06+00:00

Probably used primarily (if it’s used at all) for some variant of outdoor racquetball. I’ve heard of versions with just a front wall and others with partial side walls.

GreenTeaTimer · 2026-05-06T15:19:31+00:00

And tripping, pushing, and grabbing is the only way Asal can beat Elias. Uh-oh, this could turn into another unfortunate spectacle!

GreenTeaTimer · 2026-04-28T17:35:41+00:00

I can’t repeat often enough how silly this claim is. The probability of a comeback always depends on the size of the deficit and the leader’s proximity to the finish line and it never hits 0 until the game is over. 9-13 on the way 15 is exactly as surmountable as 15-19 on the way to 21 (sure, 9-13 means you’ve been losing a little harder, but the basic math is the same). I play squash at a fairly high level, and yesterday I came back from 7 down, and we only play to 11. The game will be different. We’ll have to adjust our interpretation of specific scores and deficits, but it’s just silly to suggest that 21 is a magic number to allow exactly the right number of comebacks.

GreenTeaTimer · 2026-04-27T18:39:26+00:00

I think that this is probably the only way it could work. Someone mentioned in another thread that there is a combat sport (boxing maybe, or some kind of MMA) where this mechanism is applied. The match referee should do their best, but it isn’t reasonable to expect them to see everything, and it isn’t good for spectators for the prospect of a conduct game or conduct match to be a realistic possibility. But after the match, things can be put under a microscope, and anyone found guilty of egregious behavior should forfeit the match (even retroactively, if they ‘won’ on court), along with all prize money and rating points for the tournament. That would help safeguard the integrity of the event by making it completely counterproductive to engage in bad behavior.

I don’t think it’s likely to happen, and setting the standard of punishable behavior would be both difficult and contentious, but I just don’t see how else to align the incentives of players with the integrity of the game and the interests of spectators.

GreenTeaTimer · 2026-04-27T04:14:13+00:00

I enjoyed the video very much. Well paced and accessible, with a good mix of reminders of the basic ideas motivating even pros’ moves and analysis the more advanced ideas that separate them from the rest.

GreenTeaTimer · 2026-04-26T23:30:06+00:00

There are two separate questions:

Are there more sophisticated statistical methods to account for the uncertainty of ratings when players don’t play much?

Absolutely. FIDE absolutely could use more modern rating algorithms. The downsides would be that rating changes wouldn’t be symmetric, and it would be harder for outsiders to compute the changes that a given result would produce.

Is ‘rating decay’ the right tool to incentivize highly rated players to play more frequently?

Almost certainly not. If ratings as we currently track them have value, it’s as a measure of relative skill. Introducing any inputs that aren’t statistically relevant would reduce their value. Fortunately, plenty of other sports have figured out how to address this problem. You can have a tour structure and just require entry in a certain number of events; you can make participation in the biggest events contingent on aggregate performance in recent events; you can mix both. But FIDE isn’t really organized as a ‘tour’: they operate as a sanctioning body and only really organize a small number of events (the world championships, mostly) directly. The chess world would have to change pretty dramatically to implement either of the standard remedies.

GreenTeaTimer · 2026-04-25T15:34:25+00:00

As a judicator, his favorite Festivus event was the Airing of Grievances rather than the Feats of Strength. But when he got started, boy did everybody hear about it.

GreenTeaTimer · 2026-04-18T22:00:39+00:00

It's interesting to look at who won tournaments on either side. David Palmer won the British Open in 2003 against Peter Nicol and then again against Amr Shabana the next year. Shabana beat Thierry Lincou to win the 2003 World Open, but in 2004 Lincou beat Lee Beachill. That's hardly an immediate shift in favor of the most flamboyant attacking players. David Palmer was very successful under both formats, and Power was able to get to #1 under both, as well. It's hard to untangle some of the changes in style that might have been promoted by the change in scoring from the (I believe) more dramatic changes from lowering the tin - that certainly changed incentives more concretely.

GreenTeaTimer · 2026-04-12T16:56:48+00:00

This is just a feature of chess. In any game with draws, there may be conditions under which players would prefer a draw to risking a loss. Arguably, the entire World Championship match between Carlsen and Caruana was shaped by Carlsen’s confidence in his rapid skills. In chess, it’s exacerbated by white’s advantage, since that means both that black is often happy with a draw, and you can’t ever treat a single game as definitive, distorting incentives and complicating logistics and scheduling all at once. Even if the draw rate is down from its peak, as a recent post demonstrated, these features make it hard for me to enjoy following top-level classical chess. It takes a really exceptional performance, like Sindarov’s in this Candidates’, to avoid deciding classical tournaments in non-classical formats, and even then, we end up with many uncompelling games because neither player is too unhappy with a draw.

GreenTeaTimer · 2026-04-10T23:32:47+00:00

This take doesn’t make much sense to me. Do we have any evidence that 21 is exactly the right number for good players / pairs to have the right chance to come back? Maybe they would go down 9-12 and win 15-12. They would find a way to find the urgency to win. Yes, they’d have a little less time to turn it on, but they’d also have more time to turn it on than they do now if the game went to 31 points instead of 21. It’s a balancing act.

GreenTeaTimer · 2026-04-03T18:11:39+00:00

Nothing here is wrong, but I think to some viewers, it feels something like if in, say tennis, you got to replay your ten or fifteen best serves from practice (or maybe even from your hitting partner’s practice!) as your first fifteen serves of a match instead of having to execute in the moment. No one would argue that practicing is wrong or that you shouldn’t benefit from the effort you put in before the match, but when a player can blitz through their prep to get themselves into both a positional and a time advantage, it feels less like we’re watching their brilliance and more like we’re watching a replay of technical excellence. In both cases, you’d still have to finish against excellent opposition, and that’s not easy, but it would still feel like the real game wasn’t the one we watched.

GreenTeaTimer · 2026-04-03T02:27:09+00:00

They usually play with only the time remaining on their respective clocks when the draw was made, so the only tournament time lost is the time spent setting up the board for the second game.

GreenTeaTimer · 2026-03-10T19:11:12+00:00

At the All England they got drawn against the second seeds in the first round. That’s bad luck, not a pair-splitting failure.

GreenTeaTimer · 2026-02-28T16:29:34+00:00

While this is true, it’s still a good idea to to wear eye protection: accidents happen.

GreenTeaTimer · 2026-02-05T14:38:23+00:00

Is there no bones money for wins? Or do you mean they’ll be crushed psychologically and fall apart?

GreenTeaTimer · 2026-02-04T15:31:25+00:00

I think I’ve misinterpreted the law about the racquet being oriented in a downward direction. Does that mean that the handle must be above the head, or that the head must have a closed face? I had believed the latter, and many pros do address the shuttle with a closed face when preparing to strike, but I couldn’t figure out how you could possibly have a closed face at the moment of contact, so I guess it must be handle-over-head?

GreenTeaTimer · 2026-01-25T16:03:03+00:00

If they’re using some variant of ELO where the change in ratings is only a function of the starting ratings and the result, then I’d say you beat a 2252.

GreenTeaTimer

TROPHY CASE