If you follow elite chess — or, frankly, even just mid-tier tournament drama — you may have heard that 17-year-old American grandmaster Christopher Yoo was suspended in October 2023 after an incident in which he physically struck a videographer during the U.S. Chess Championship.

The incident reportedly involved Yoo hitting a media staffer with a tripod after a loss — a real-world meltdown at a very online kind of event. The U.S. Chess Federation (US Chess) responded with a one-year suspension, followed by five years of probation. It was one of the most serious disciplinary actions in recent American chess memory.

So imagine our confusion — and that of many others — when Yoo showed up, just a few months later, playing in international FIDE-rated tournaments like nothing had happened. Was the ban lifted? Shortened? Ignored?

Well. Here’s where we messed up — and what we’ve since learned.

First, an important correction: FIDE did not issue a ban.

The suspension came from US Chess, and applies only to tournaments under their jurisdiction — which means domestic U.S. events, not global ones. While we previously wrote that FIDE had issued its own ban, there is no public record of that happening. We regret the error and apologize to FIDE for implying in both our article and tweet that they were responsible for enforcing a ban that was never theirs to begin with.

And that brings us to the real issue: the fragmented, often opaque system of disciplinary enforcement in chess, where federations operate semi-independently and consequences don’t always travel well across borders.

In most sports, a ban for physical assault would trigger a cascade of suspensions — domestic, international, commercial. In chess, if one federation issues a ban, other organizers aren’t necessarily obligated to enforce it. Unless FIDE chooses to take up the case itself, based on the Federation’s reqeust — which has not been done here — players are technically free to compete abroad, even if they’re suspended at home.

Which Yoo is doing. He’s playing abroad. And unless the tournament is in the U.S. — or explicitly aligned with US Chess — he’s not breaking any rules by doing so.

Still, the situation feels… odd. A teenage grandmaster is serving a serious suspension for a violent outburst at a national championship, but continues competing on the global stage, where the incident is barely acknowledged and the ban doesn’t legally follow him.

That’s not FIDE’s fault. It’s a governance problem. Chess is a global sport with no global code of conduct, at least not one that travels neatly from federation to federation. As a result, even serious violations can become localized — like the laws in a chess-themed Wild West.

We’re not calling for pitchforks. We’re not here to ruin a teenager’s life. We just think a sport that aspires to be taken seriously — Olympic seriously, billion-dollar-sponsor seriously — should maybe have a system that reflects that.

And we should do our part, too. So:

Dear FIDE, we’re sorry.
You didn’t issue the ban, and you weren’t supposed to enforce it. We got that wrong, and we’ll do better.

Correction: In our original version of this piece — and the accompanying tweet — we implied that Christopher Yoo was banned by FIDE. That part’s on us. The actual ban came from the U.S. Chess Federation, and as far as we can tell, FIDE has not issued its own separate sanction. That means the ban is enforceable only within the United States, and Yoo remains technically eligible to play in FIDE-rated events internationally.

FIDE isn’t obligated to enforce US Chess suspensions, nor to broadcast them. So while we still believe it’s a little wild for a player under an assault-related suspension to show up at tournaments like nothing happened, the issue isn’t FIDE failing to enforce a ban. The US Chess Federation has an option to appeal to FIDE to ban the player globally, but they did not request such a ban according to FIDE official.