Chess Star Quits EventOver a Pair of Pants

The pinnacle of chess has weathered its fair share of controversies in recent years, including a cheating dustup, geopolitical tension, and players' bizarre complaints about creaky floors.

- JOSHUA ROBINSON AND ANDREW BEATON

But this week, that list gained its strangest entry yet: Chess now has a pants controversy.

The biggest fashion faux pas this side of the Met Gala unfolded in lower Manhattan on Friday, when five-time world champion Magnus Carlsen arrived at the upscale Cipriani Wall Street, host of this year's World Rapid Chess Championship, wearing something organizers considered utterly inappropriate. He was sporting a pair of jeans.

To FIDE, the game's world governing body, this was as unacceptable as moving a pawn three spaces.

Denim, FIDE said, is "explicitly prohibited under longstanding regulations for this event" and promptly fined Carlsen, one of the greatest chess players of all time, $200 for his infraction. When the chief arbiter requested that Carlsen change his clothes, he declined to do so. And as a result, the 34year-old grandmaster from Norway wasn't assigned a match in the following round. It was chess's equivalent of a one-game suspension.