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You Don't Get to Know Who Won the Titled Arena, Sorry.

It is quite interesting to look through the (actually few and IMHO weak) arguments mentioned in this thread that try to explain this irrational call for anonimity in official tournament games (as for friendly games I don't mind).
Some people say about "spirit of freedom", while other mention chess.com, and its jealousy about allowing title players they support, to play anywhere else.

When you combine both it shows, that maybe this "spirit of freedom" in lichess is needed by some for not losing the paid slavery somewhere else.

Now imagine, that all participants of Wijk an Zee (nowadays Tata Steel) are not allowed to play in Dortmund or Tal Memorial in Moscow, because WaZ organizers don't want the top GMs they paid to play anywhere else. So in "spirit of freedom", some are taking part in Dortmund, but only with their identity hidden (possible ideas how to do it in my previous post). Spirit of freedom, congratulations.
@pgierech (#161)

I think we both agree that there are people everywhere which don't like their games published (even in Warsaw).

Our disagreement is in how many people think like that. Well first of all we are here talking about titled players which is a very specific group of players (the top 1%). In fact less than 10% of the comments made here, were of titled players. Myself I am a titled player but on purpose avoided a verification of my title.

I am maintaining a chessblog for almost a decade and have written many times about how often players are hiding their games/ knowledge about chess for different reasons. Please have a look (some of the articles are written in the Dutch language).

http://schaken-brabo.blogspot.com/2012/11/partijpublicaties.html
http://chess-brabo.blogspot.com/2015/04/password.html
http://chess-brabo.blogspot.com/2017/12/secret.html
http://chess-brabo.blogspot.com/2019/01/snoop.html
http://schaken-brabo.blogspot.com/2019/11/schaken-en-copyright.html
http://chess-brabo.blogspot.com/2020/01/papua-new-guinea.html
http://chess-brabo.blogspot.com/2020/04/to-study-openings-part-4.html
http://chess-brabo.blogspot.com/2020/07/clubchess-andor-internetchess-part-2.html
http://schaken-brabo.blogspot.com/2021/05/partijen-becommentarieren-deel-2.html
http://schaken-brabo.blogspot.com/2021/06/gebruikersnamen.html
@pgierech (#162)

Many companies demand of their employees/ cocontractors to sign exclusivity contracts. This means they can not work simultaneoulsy and/or afterwards for competitors (lichess is a competitor for chess.com). There are some very high penalties for breaking those contracts.

This has of course nothing to do with spirit of freedom but rather pure economical reasons.
I think Lichess is doing everything just right with respect to anonymity and I hope nothing changes.
@inter_mezzo "why do people need to be anonymous?"

There are many possible reasons and some good ones like contracts with chess.com have been mentioned already, but that does not matter. People should not be forced to choose between agency over their data and freedom of choice(e.g. participating in a titled arena on lichess' terms) when there is no legal reason.

Why do you think it is reasonable for pseudonymous people to have agency over a persons data?
@kjf "Why do you think it is reasonable for pseudonymous people to have agency over a persons data?"

You seem to have a general problem with any company or organisation having agency over a persons data. That's a point of principle that I don't agree with but I respect your position. I don't think that it is 'unreasonable' for a company or organisation to have agency over a persons data if that person has agreed to the terms of its use. Whenever I sign up to any online service or to receive some sort of communication from a company or organisation I expect that they are going to use my data for a variety of different purposes and that I have a right to opt out of them using my data in certain ways if I want. I also understand that the law prevents them from using my data in certain ways and I have to have faith that that company or organisation will abide by the law. If I didn't have trust in them then I wouldn't sign up.

Getting back to the point at hand, Lichess have decided on their position and explained their rationale. I think that the position is reasonable but my general point still stands - I can't really conceive of a good reason why these types of tournaments aren't played on the basis that, if you want to play, you have to agree to being identified/identifiable. What's wrong with transparency? We have cheats and abusers who are exploiting our unwillingness to expect people online to share their true identities and I think that is a shame.
If you use, YouTube streams of a tournament (especially ones by popular streamers), this anonymous winner tournament was a failure. I can't find even 1 english language YouTube stream of this tournament. 🤐
@mvha (#162 & to some degree #161)

First of all thank you for an interesting dedicated answer. I appreciate it, even if I don't share at least some of your arguments.
I answer now without reading the couple of links you have sent me. I will look through them, particularly those that are not in Dutch (I hope however I will understand some written Dutch through German and English - with spoken one I know it is far more difficult :D).

To make it clear - I do not distinguish titled and untitled players as for anonimity. I think generally it is wrong to all players to hide their identity in any official tournament. Even if there are some personal gains (by the way unjust to those who don't use anonimity like e.g. @RealDavidNavara ), this situation has obvious drawbacks to the community. Lichess is losing the chance of publish names of strong players names using it (some even heavily, if it is true as someone above mentioned about playing 10k games yearly here), and on lower levels lurking in anonimity gives paradise for all cheaters. And being a titled, so professional or at least semiprofessional player, you perfectly know it is a worldwide growing problem in chess.

The argument about "many companies demand of their employees/ cocontractors to sign exclusivity contracts" is actually against many arguments of your fellow supporters of the anonimity idea. You know, it means simply that anonimity is breaking signed the agreements with chess.com, and also working against the interest of the community of lichess. If someone (not you) is writing about spirit of freedom, so that he could hide his name here, and publish it on chess.com, it means a kind of greed and egoism, that is in some languages described as "to eat your cake, and to have your cake simultaneously". Such a player want to keep money from chess.com (maybe even cheating them, but without doing it under own name, so they don't care), and wants to use all the opportunities given by lichess.org (both by the webpage itself, as well its community), but without giving anything from himself. Obvious freeloading...

Last but not least - it is obviously immoral, and harmful for chess community - the existence of contracts in that players agree to not to play in some places, real or virtual, because of colaborating with someone. It is definitely not the situation similar to labour contract. Chess.com is a platform for playing, like is lichess. Imagine, the Belgian federation would give some scholarship to best Belgian players and would not allow them to play in tournaments organized in Netherlands, Germany, or Poland. Or - if you feel Belgian federation is not comparable in strength to chess.com, let it be European chess federation with all national member chess federations. You could play in Brussels, but not in Abu Dhabi or Washington, DC.

It is crazy.
I understand chess.com would disagree to such players to do works for lichess - being admins here, providing lessons, simultans, or broadcasting channels. That is a kind of work done for the competing platform. But playing?

Maybe chess.com supported players should have a mark about that here in lichess (that actually would be even more transparent!) so that chess.com needs are satisfied too, but they should appear here under their actual name, if they like playing here, and are using lichess resources - human and material.
@pgierech (#170)

As I wrote on my blog, every person represents a brand with his/her name. A brand has a certain value so each of us have a certain value to the market.

Magnus Carlsen can play soccer, play the bongocloud, buy a new car ... and still people want to know all about it just because it is Magnus Carlsen. When you look at any tournament he plays, he always gets 10 more visitors even if he is losing. I mean the quality is not in accordance with the number of publicity generated.

This is very clear with Magnus Carlsen but you see that everywhere. A brand product can easily be twice as expensive to a completely similar anonymous product.

Now a site like chess.com has a commercial model built around attracting as much players as possible. Names of titled players are magnets and this definitely includes the playing. These magnets work best if the same names are not playing on other places. Personally I see nothing wrong if a company wants to pay double for exclusivity of usage of the names. This is a very normal business.

I know a number of tournaments and federations putting all kind of conditions to the participants. There was some time ago several articles about how much pressure the Indian federation put on their own countrymen. It is legal but we can of course wonder if this ethically correct (whatever that means).

Crazy? It is reality and based on how money defines the rules as almost always. Lichess is for free so is in weak position here.
@inter_mezzo Thank you for the detailed answer.

"You seem to have a general problem with any company or organisation having agency over a persons data."
Correct and I firmly believe any other point of view is the result of a lack of information what could be done with big data collections no matter how trivial the data might seem in the first place. Most importantly data shared by a group of people will affect other people that did not choose to share their data, often to their disadvantage.

"I can't really conceive of a good reason why these types of tournaments aren't played on the basis that, if you want to play, you have to agree to being identified/identifiable."
As said before, there are already a couple of very good reasons in this very thread that I won't reiterate.

"What's wrong with transparency?"
People should not have agency over other people's data.

"We have cheats and abusers who are exploiting our unwillingness to expect people online to share their true identities and I think that is a shame."
I'm not sure this is a valid argument in the context of the discussion as lichess does verify the identity of titled players. We just don't get to see them if they choose to remain anonymous.

Maybe my question was formulated poorly so here an attempt at rephrasing it:
Why should person B get to decide whether or not the identity of person A is public and not person A?

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