Two People Died While Competing In An Event Where You Run Back To Back Marathons, Just Kidding, It Was A Chess Tournament

English- Two contestants in the just-ended Chess Olympiad in northern Norway died on the event’s final day, apparently from natural causes, police said Friday. ??A player from the Seychelles in his late 60s collapsed in the middle of a game on Thursday, the last day of the prestigious world chess finals in the Arctic city of Tromsoe.??An attempt to resuscitate him failed, but not before a disturbance broke out among members of the audience who mistook a heart defibrillator for a weapon. ??Later in the evening a contestant from Uzbekistan was found dead in a hotel room. ??”It’s a tragic and natural death,” Jarle Heitmann, a spokesman for the World Chess Federation, told AFP, without elaborating on the cause of death or releasing the two names. ??Tromsoe police said there was no suspicion of foul play in either of the deaths. ??A minute’s silence was observed at the closing ceremony of the Chess Olympiad to mark the death of the first player, as the second death was not discovered until later.

Holy shit!  Bodies dropping left and right at this chess tournament.  I bet reading an article that said, “A minute’s silence was observed at the closing ceremony of the Chess Olympiad to mark the death of the first player, as the second death was not discovered until later.” was something you didn’t think you would read today.  Who knew chess was such a rigorous game?  Maybe we’ve been judging chess wrong all of these years.  All of those poor nerdy chess players getting picked on in high school because nobody viewed it as a cool thing to do.  But now that we know there’s a chance you can drop dead right in the middle of a match/game/whatever the hell it’s called I’d say we all have a decent amount of crow to eat.  All chess needed was some of their guys to shove off into the dark abyss during a tournament and their street cred is currently blasting through the roof.  Hip hop music works the same way.  Nobody takes it seriously until somebody gets gunned down off the Vegas strip.  Chess players just went from the biggest pussies around to leap frogging the starting quarterback for the #1 spot in the Badass Who Gets All The Chicks rankings at every high school in the world.  Good for them.  They’ve been oppressed for too long.

It’s interesting that the cause of death for both of these guys was “natural causes”.  That doesn’t sound right.  Two guys at the same tournament died after playing non-stop chess, one died in the middle of a game, and we’ll just call it natural causes and move on.  Open and shut case.