Fabiano Caruana’s blunt interview slamming the organisers of Freestyle Chess for allowing live audiences in the playing arena was reportedly deleted from their YouTube channel and was later restored, the player claimed on his own podcast, C Squared. Caruana had said that he was “mostly glad” that the Las Vegas leg of the Freestyle Chess Grand Slam Tour was over. Caruana had defeated Arjun Erigaisi to end in fifth place at the event, thus taking home $50,000 (approximately Rs 43 lakh).
On his podcast C Squared, Caruana was told by Christian Chirila: “They deleted your interview, man.” To this, Caruana replied that the organisers had put it back up on the handle. “I don’t think they had any need to to remove it in the first place. But yeah, eventually they put it back up.”
Asked by Chirila if he was offended by the video being deleted, Caruana said: “Not really, but you know, the thing is obviously they’re not censoring me, right? I can speak pretty freely. I don’t think their intention was to (do that). I just don’t don’t know why they decided to delete it. I guess to have time to discuss what to do, but you know, it usually doesn’t work very well to do that. If you try to hide something, usually it tends to come out in a more…
LISTEN: Caruana explains drama behind scenes
Caruana continued: “I had some complaints which I’m sure they’ll work on in the future to to do better. I don’t think it really made sense to not say anything because they’re going to have more events. I’m probably going to play more of their events. So, why should I not let them know that there’s an issue?”
WATCH: Fabiano Caruana’s deleted interview
But what were the complaints in Caruana’s interview that the organisers deleted and then restored it?
Caruana was unhappy with the fact that the spectators who were going to be in the playing hall would have access to live commentary with a few seconds delay and that they could also know via the eval bar what each player’s standing was in the game happening in front of them.
“The match (against Hikaru Nakamura which he lost), I did like start to just get very annoyed at the whole tournament. I mean, it’s fine to play the super long days, but I don’t think it should come down to basically like outside interference. Not to make excuses, but I mean, the spectators are basically just yelling when we have five seconds each. Hikaru was was crushing me and then, you know, he probably had some mate, but it wasn’t easy. He had 5 seconds. He went back with the queen. I was back in the game. And around this moment there was just like yelling. I mean like very (loud yelling). I’m not exaggerating at all. It was just screaming in the audience and you can’t
play with five seconds. So we both blundered. I could basically have mated him and also won his queen on two different occasions. It just leaves a bad taste,” Caruana had told the media team of Freestyle Chess after the tournament ended.
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Caruana said that he only found out during the players’ meeting before the tournament started that audiences would have access to evaluation bar. The evaluation bar is an indicator of the match situation.
“I thought there would be some perhaps whispers that we would hear. But it was much more than that. They were just yelling and we could hear that even through headphone, even through noise-cancelling headphones and like very audibly. It wasn’t some noise in the background like it was very audible,” Caruana had said.
