this type of stuff I will never get. why are you in a competition if you don’t want to do the thing you competing in to win. join an assasin competition.
What an imbecile. Mercury is a planet. It is too large to be hidden anywhere on a chess board
Wrong. Mercury is a god. He’s much too powerful to do the biddings of a puny mortal.
You’re both wrong, it’s a car. I’m pretty crazy about one though.
You all were close but, still wrong. Marie Curie was a scientist.
You’re also wrong. He’s a singer known as Freddie. And I don’t know what kind of necromancy was used to get him on a chess board.
what kind of necromancy
This whole thread is a clue about that.
The necromancers used myrrh & curry.
What a weird way to try to poison someone. Mercury is really only poisonous under specific circumstances. Specifically, it is extremely dangerous to breath its vapors.
Touching it, or being near a small amount of it a few feet away really doesn’t do anything. It’s a safe-ish substance to make casual contact with (still not safe, but not profoundly noxious either).
There have been cases of people surviving drinking and even injecting mercury, as it isn’t toxic the way you might think it is under most circumstances.
It is still quite a dangerous thing, and using it maliciously (even if you have no idea what you’re doing) is no joke. Fortunately, the person targeted here is likely unaffected by mercury exposure.
What is it with Russian athletes (being it mental or physical) just always cheating so much that at this point it’s just expected?
Would it have anything to do with living in a dictatorship with a leader who always needs to be perceived as the best with the best countryband the best people because of his policies?
Probably because they were raised in the post-Soviet mafia era.
it was all a result of a misunderstanding. his coach told him to focus on the H, G files of the chessboard and he heard that as something else.
*she
How would it have poisoned just his rival and not also him? Touching it doesn’t do much unless you’re submerging your skin in it for long periods. The fumes would affect everyone. And it’s very unlikely his opponent would have licked the board to ingest the mercury.
Organic mercury compounds can look like water and absorb quickly through skin, they can be potent enough for just a drop on your skin being deadly, even if you have gloves as it can penetrate quickly through many different rubbers. Metallic doesn’t kill you even if you ate it*. With metallic mercury highest risk is vapours but unless you heat it it will only become a problem in poorly ventalated areas.
*assuming you have no open wounds on your digestive tract and minor chronic damage might be still caused depending on amount and frequency.
Metallic doesn’t kill you even if you ate it
The article says it’s safe to touch and even swallow, but inhaling it causes problems consistent with the victim’s symptoms.
Between this, the antisemitism of Bobby Fischer, and the guy cheating with the power of teledildonics, I have to wonder what the hell is up with chess players.
The only murder in Antarctica was a Russian killing somrone with an ice ax over a game of chess.
Hmmm lets examine this statement.
Isolated weird place, scary Russians, Russian stereotypes of intellectual game + tremendous violence.
Gee, it almost sounds like this is a too convenient racist lie. Any proof? The oldest reference just says ‘it totally happened’ and cites something I can’t access on Google books. It’s 20 years after the fact and not a primary source.
Poisoning people, pushing people out of windows, and shooting people twice in the back of the head. The holy trinity of Russian assassinations.
You had the chance to legitimately used ‘defenestration’ and you didn’t jump on it?!
russians prove they can’t win anything legitimately
…this was a regional tournament, in the Caucasus Republic of Dagestan.
So calling them Russian is technically accurate, but really they are a brutalized and subjugated colonial subject of Russia.
Also, you’ll find this kind of crazy anywhere you go. She literally just dumped mercury around her opponents chess board when she thought no one was around to notice.
I get why it’s catching headlines, but give me a break. It’s just crazy being crazy.
So calling them Russian is technically accurate
The word Russian has two meanings in English. It can mean relating to the country of Russia, or relating to the Rus ethnicity.
The Russian language distinguishes the two. The first is росси́йский. The second is ру́сский. Both words are translated as “Russian” in English, which causes confusion in English, but there’s no such confusion in Russian.
These people (Dagestanis) are Russian in the first sense, but not the second sense.
Historically, the second sense of “Russian” included Ukrainians and Belarussians (so you could say Ukrainians were Russian in the second sense, but not the first sense) but it’s become controversial to do so since the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
At least they didn’t “fall out the window.”
