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Comment by yodsanklai | Hacker News Reader

Lots of sports have dress codes. Having jeans matching jackets isn't more stupid than let say only "white or blue" gis in Judo, or only-white attire in some tennis tournaments. It's part of the folklore and many people are attached to traditions.

There are also many precedents of athletes challenging the dress-code, I can think of Serena Williams at French Tennis Open.

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/04/16/sport/serena-williams-ico...

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Chess isn’t a sport. How many game tournaments have dress codes?

It is a mental sport

They probably have some sort of dress code (no flip flops, no shirtless), but usually not this strict.

In what world is chess a sport? It's a board game, they are not athletes, and marketing chess as a sport just comes across as either a financial decision, or delusional to me. The fact that chess isn't a sport doesn't make it any less valid or valuable, any less respectable, but it does mean that comparing it to tennis is downright odd.

Who are you to decide if chess is a sport or not? The practitioners think it is, so that's what matters.

It does not matter if we say it is a sport or not, it is not a sensible argument because the point of what uniforms are allowed and what not in sports have either to do with functionality (certain pieces of clothes can improve performance, and rules have to assert which are the specific bounds for that) or advertising/other reasons (a lot of which are actually _bad_ reasons, see certain female dress codes). These arguments have nothing to do with chess, so it makes no sense to apply this line of argumentation here.

Uniforms in sports have often to do with tradition (on top of the aspects you mentioned). Look at Golf, Tennis or Judo/BJJ dress codes for instance. Most sports have a dress code and if you look into the details, there are often arbitrary elements.

Many other social activities which you may not call sport have dress codes too. On the top of my head, I can think of Bridge or Snooker. Nothing really fundamentally peculiar with Chess. I don't blame Carlsen for asking to review the rules though.

Just to make a point here, Judo/BJJ stand out because their "dress codes" are actually part of how the sport works in practice. A lot of throws and holds involve the gi, so standardizing what's worn (which has been done in the case of Judo for a very long time) isn't just aesthetic or traditional. I don't believe that in the case of, for example golf, the dress code is functional.

I was specifically referring to the color. You can't show up with a green gi. Actually, it was controversial when blue gis were introduced in the late 90s. In Judo, it's currently only white or blue.

But different chess tournaments have different dress codes. Maybe FIDE has a most strict one but I don’t see how this is a universal chess tradition.

Moreover, in the examples you give clothes also serve a practical use within the game itself, except maybe golf not as significantly. But golf is also another peculiar case of a sport and one that carries different traditions. Eg esp for BJJ I would say clothes are important part of the game in ways that it is not for chess.

I agree that FIDE’s dress code is prob more similar to dress code of social activities like bridge. But I would also expect some people to get confused over how strict these are from time to time, and ppl certainly do not become grandmasters by memorising dress code rules. This has happened before anyway and ppl did not think it was an intentional act of activism to dress in shorts either [0].

[0] https://www.chess.com/news/view/dress-code-incident-at-world...

So players should be allowed to play shirtless, in a bikini, in underwear?

Maybe it's stupid that it's this strict, but many of these “sports” (or whatever you want to call them) have a dress code.

Chess's is definitely not stricter than (e.g.) snooker's.

Do they think it's a sport? From what I can see on places like r/Chess and Chess.com that's far from being the case; at best it's an ongoing debate. Mostly though it seems to be a matter of marketing, not by the average player, but by the industries which cater to them and want to grow the game.

For me though, I think a good test is that if you can play it via long-term correspondence, it isn't a sport or any sort of athletic activity. I don't feel like gatekeeping sport as strenuous physical activity, but there surely has to be at least some somatic component.

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