Robot Grabs, Breaks 7-Year-Old Boy’s Finger at Russian Chess Tournament: Report

A chess-playing robot grabbed the finger of a seven-year-old boy and broke it during the ongoing match with him at the Moscow Open last week, according to news reports.

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The incident took place on July 19 and videos of it were soon circulated on the Internet. A clip, shared by the Baza Telegram channel, shows the robot pinching the boy's finger with its arm and holding it for several seconds even as the young player tries to free himself.

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Soon, people rush to intervene and help the child. As reported by Baza, the boy was identified as Christopher, one of the 30 best chess players in Moscow in the under-nines category.

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“The robot broke the child's finger,” Sergey Lazarev, president of the Moscow Chess Federation told Russian news agency TASS.

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He added that the machine had played at several exhibitions before but such an untoward incident never happened. “This is, of course, bad,” Lazarev said.

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According to Sergey Smagin, vice-president of the Russian Chess Federation, the robot appeared to pounce after picking one of the boy's pieces.

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