Game Blotter

In Kalispell, Montana, a man attacked people with bear spray, then stole a backpack containing chef’s knives, a “very expensive Dungeons & Dragons player’s guide and expensive card packs.” Later, he dumped the backpack and knives but kept the game stuff.

The owner of Battleground Games, a retail store in Modesto, was arrested for allegedly robbing 11 banks around Northern California. His father says he did it to shore up the failing business.

All the Rage Comics and Games in Festus, Missouri was burglarized overnight but the burglar was caught because he left behind his cell phone.

Researchers from Hebrew University and Ben Gurion University found that the winners in one game are more likely to cheat in subsequent games. Because the increased cheating occured in experiments where the winners of the first game were determined by performance but did not occur when winners were determined randomly, the researchers surmised that the cheating is the result of winners feeling that they deserved to win.

At a Chess tournament in Ukraine, one contestant’s trainer assaulted the pupil’s opponent during a game. What so upset the trainer that he would punch the opposing player? His pupil, who was the winner of last year’s tournament, had made a mistake and her opponent, rather than press for a quick victory, played a series of moves apparently designed to draw out the game.

The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission is suing a man, saying that his habit of canceling trades within a second of placing them is illegal because in such cases he doesn’t intend to follow through in the first place. The man’s defense is that his experience as a competitive speed Chess player gives him exceptional reflexes and allows him to react at fantastic speeds.

A 60 year-old innocent bystander was shot and killed in South Memphis, Tennessee. Neighbors of the victim say the shooting began as an argument over a $2 dice game wager.

The website with exclusive rights to the Candidates Tournament recently taken place in Moscow (the event for selecting Magnus Carlsen’s challenger in the World Chess Championship) suffered a denial-of-service attack during broadcast of the first round. Then when other Chess websites began filling in with live coverage of the event, the rights holder began taking legal action against them.

After being the subject of internet derision, a town council in Singapore apologized for putting up posters that banned Chess in public areas.

The Park Royal Shopping Centre in West Vancouver, British Columbia has threatened to call police if people don’t stop playing Chess in the food court. The Chess players are an informal group but have been meeting at the mall for 50 years.

At the end of a meeting that saw people throwing chairs, a no-confidence vote (42-3) sent the entire board of Kenya Chess packing, or at least it was supposed to. The board continues to work on a planned tournament as if nothing happened, while the people elected to replace them are organizing a competing event.

A Chess program being run in a Jamaican prison is meant to teach inmates better decision-making.

Last year, Spin Master was found liable in U.S. federal court for a child who suffered brain damage after swallowing Aqua Dots beads. When ingested, the toy metabolized in to GHB (also known as the date rape drug). Now the company is suing the laboratories that had been contracted to test Aqua Dots for toxicity. Spin Master claims that instead of performing oral injection toxicity tests as they certified, the labs actually just doused test animals in corn oil in which the beads had been soaked.

Among the offenses that got some professional Japanese baseball players banned from the game was gambling on Mahjong.

Hasbro was named by the Ethisphere Institute as one of 2016’s world’s most ethical companies and by the Reputation Institute as one of the most reputable companies in the United States.

In St. Croix, a man got out of his car, approached a group playing Dominoes, and began shooting. Two of the players died. Another was wounded.

Police in Bologna, Italy believe that the shooting of a Chinese man derived from a 60,000 € Mahjong gambling debt. The perpetrator and alleged victim both claim that it was a result of a mistake made during a game.

A four-time convicted felon was arrested for shooting the person to whom he lost money in a Dothan, Alabama street dice game.

In Tuscaloosa, Alabama, police are searching for a man they claim shot another man during a dice game.

A man who tried to break up a fight over a dice game in Southeast Memphis was shot for his trouble and is now paralyzed. The man who allegedly shot him is under arrest.

A dice game shooting in St. Louis left two teenagers shot in the leg but in stable condition.

When a man collapsed with a heart attack while playing Dominoes at the Bold Arms pub in Southport, the bartender gave him CPR and another patron provided constant chest compressions until an ambulance arrived.