‘We should’ve done better’: FIDE’s Emil Sutovsky on Hikaru Nakamura exploiting loophole to qualify for Candidates

“So, it’s very simple. I think A) We could do our part better. We, you know, being immersed in so many organizational regulatory issues, we somehow missed the notion of the loophole where the player would, from certain moment basically qualify using the loophole. Maybe we though better of our top players not doing that and it didn’t come naturally to our mind what would happen because with the same way we should ask that now ourselves and we are already asking and we will be swift in our action. What if anyone just decides, not for the same qualification, but just to play 50 games like that within a month against opposition which is thousand points lower and so on. Yes, I acknowledge that we should have been looking at it more scrupulously and to prevent such a loophole from happening,” Sutovsky said in an interaction with ChessBase India.

“I don’t agree with the notion that blame the rules, don’t blame the players. For some reason, no body or almost no body was doing it. Because there are legal sides of it and there is a moral side. They are two different things. so I don’t imagine many players doing the same, let’s say in such a clinical way. But again it’s not forbidden and if it was poorly regulated by FIDE, okay that created the loophole. So yes, small mistakes can happen like that. It’s not like it allowed some weak player to qualify, it allowed the World no. 2 to qualify using some loophole rather than using a proper tournament for his games and to use his existent rating because what happen that in a way that he’s farming games and also in the way he is farming the rating. It’s an indirect consequence but it is a consequence. And that’s what bugs me even more. ”

That’s the part that annoys me because it feels unfair completely to other players. It feels fair that the No. 2 is in candidates even if through a loophole but it feels unfair that farming the number of games indirectly also leads to farming the rating points and that’s upsetting. But again, I can agree that we should have done better. But the very fact that Hikaru could qualify for the candidates is very normal. But I still think that he could have farmed it in a tournament with a couple of Grand Masters and a few International Masters, not necessarily with 18 and 1900s playing,” he added.

Having played in only a handful of classical chess events this year, like the Norway Chess event, Nakamura needed to play a certain number of classical chess games till the end of the year to enter the Candidates via ratings spot in 2025. This is why Nakamura has been competing in regional events in the USA like the Louisiana State Championship and the Iowa Open, where the competition is not that strong.

Carlsen’s take

5-time World Champion Magnus Carlsen, however, did not see anything wrong with what Hikaru was doing, saying that it was a “shameless method” but but also “probably the right thing to do”.

“I kind of admire the way he is going about it because it is so shameless. The thing is a lot of players, they probably would have picked tournaments where there was maybe like a couple of IMs or something like that. But Hikaru just wants to make sure that he’s getting his games, which is the pragmatic thing to do. It’s absolutely shameless, but it’s probably the right thing to do. It looks like the system could do with some fixing. But I’m not part of that s**t anymore. So it’s fine,” Carlsen said in an interview with the Take Take Take app.