Game Blotter

After all the hype and controversy, the election for FIDE president wasn’t even a close one. Kirsan Ilyumzhinov defeated Garry Kasparov by a vote of 110 to 61.

A member of Guyana’s Chess team was denied a visa to attend the World Chess Olympiad in Tromso, Norway because his name and birth date were on an international terrorist watch list. The Russian women’s Chess team was allowed to register for the Olympiad even though it had missed the deadline. The team may have intentionally delayed registering in order to allow one prominent player to transfer from Ukraine. Two players who made it to the tournament did not make it home. One, from Uzbekistan, was found dead in his hotel room. The other, a member of the Seychelles team, collapsed during a game and was pronounced dead at the hospital. A Zambian Chess official believes that his team’s improved performance at the World Chess Olympiad is partially due to the higher price of beer in Norway.

After an unsuccessful challenge by a competitor, Choon’s Design’s patent for Rainbow Loom has been upheld.

Certain boxes of unlicensed charms for Loom bands have been removed from store shelves after testing positive for phthalates.

So far, Magnus Carlsen has refused to sign a contract for the Chess World Championship (re)match against Viswanathan Anand. The series is scheduled to take place in November in Sochi, Russia but Carlsen’s manager wants to have the event pushed back to 2015. Anand, however, did sign the contract. Not that we expect this situation to persist. Nevertheless, if Carlsen continues to refuse, eventually Sergey Karjakin would take his place.

[I love this headline…] “Athens Cop Encounters Suspected Dice Game“—Though the people the police officer thought were playing dice gathered up all the evidence before he was able to confirm his suspicions, he was able to arrest one of them on trespassing charges.

The National Chess Federation of the Philippines has refused to release GM Wesley So, who would prefer to transfer his FIDE registration to the United States. So is currently a student at Webster University in Missouri and ranked 14th in world by FIDE. Without the transfer of registration, So will be excluded from FIDE tournaments for 2 years.

Some time ago, DaVinci Editrice sued Ziko Games, claiming that the latter’s Legends of the Three Kingdoms game copies DaVinci’s Bang. In a recent ruling on the case, a federal District Court judge has refused to grant DaVinci’s request for a preliminary injunction and has also dismissed the company’s claim of unfair competition and unjust enrichment under Texas state law. The judge, for now however, did uphold DaVinci’s claim of copyright infringement, finding that though game mechanics can not be copyrighted, there were enough similarities between the characters in both games for the case to go to trial.

A pair of teachers idled by a labor dispute in Vancouver, Canada launched a board game project on Kickstarter as a political statement. In Christy’s World, players move their pawns around a map of British Columbia collecting unpopularity points for closing schools and privatizing industry.

A day after a man and a woman in Las Vegas argued over a dice game, the woman allegedly returned to the man’s apartment and killed him. The woman was later arrested in Utah and is awaiting extradition.

Two men in Buffalo were on their way to seek revenge for a dice game argument earlier in the evening when they were attacked in their car and killed first.

A man in Erie, Pennsylvania told police that he was gambling on dice at 4:00 AM on a Sunday morning, when another player, who the original article describes as a “disgruntled opponent“, hit him on the head with a gun.

The CEO of Hasbro, Brian Goldner, was diagnosed with prostate cancer but plans to stay on in the position. Sylvia Hassenfeld, the matriarch of the family that founded Hasbro, a philanthropist, and a leader of international social aide organizations, died August 16th at the age of 93.

In Rockford, Illinois, a man pled guilty and was sentenced to 13 years in prison for shooting his opponent in a game of Dominoes. The two had gotten in to a fist-fight but the other man was getting in to his car to leave when the first man shot him.

Scientific Games’s new Yahtzee slot machine is the first online casino game based on a Hasbro-licensed game property.

Police in Detroit say that the shooting of a teen and two men (one of whom was killed) was the outcome of an argument during a dice game.

A man in Plainfield, New Jersey is being held on $1 million bail after being arrested for allegedly killing someone that he was playing dice with.

A man in Malaysia collapsed and died watching a game of Mahjong.