Here are some topics for discussion, all involving the ongoing 2015 World Cup.
(1) Castlegate. In the final game of the tiebreaks between Hikaru Nakamura and Ian Nepomniachtchi, Nakamura was guilty of a double no-no - one intentional and one not. The first was castling with two hands, and the second was that he apparently touched the rook first by an almost unnoticeable fraction of a second. (I'll ignore the second point in what follows.) While there is no evidence to think that this made the slightest difference in terms of the outcome of the game, and Nepomniachtchi didn't seem to react to it when it happened, what Nakamura did was against the rules.
After the game, however, he filed a protest, aiming to have his opponent forfeited for his action. The appeals committee agreed that what Nakamura did was wrong, but denied that Nepomniachtchi could make a case since he didn't do anything at the time of the infraction. Since Nepomniachtchi claimed that Nakamura castled in this illegal way through the tiebreaks, why didn't he protest earlier? (In fact, Nakamura has been doing this in blitz for many years, but I suspect he won't do it any more, at least not in any official competitions.) The timing of the complaint looks like a last ditch effort to achieve by a technicality what he couldn't do over the board.
That said, it's surprising that Nakamura didn't know better, and it's even more surprising that the arbiters never did a thing about it. (Maybe they just didn't know the rule?) Nepomniachtchi was justifiably upset about that. Nepomniachtchi also complained about Nakamura's adjusting pieces on the squares without explicitly j'adoubing them. I've seen many players do that in blitz - including Carlsen, I think - and it's really pretty obvious that they are adjusting the piece without any intention of moving it, e.g. by nudging it with their fingertip or even their fingernail. There's more on the story here and here (N.B. there's a bit of crass language at the second link).
(2) Partial Delays. Each day, at least during the classical stages of each round, a certain number of games, chosen at random, weren't shown live but only on a 15-minute delay. This is a bit annoying for the spectators and for the commentators as well, who often simply ignored the directive and had the cameras show a bit of the board. I know they've been doing this for years at Dortmund, but can someone please explain to me how this is supposed to prevent cheating? I guess the fantasy is that there's a guy watching in the hotel, and he communicates via some sort of earpiece to a spectator, who in turn finds some way of signaling the player (by coughing, standing in a certain location - whatever). There must be better ways to handle the problem than this: signal-jamming, arranging the lights so the audience can't be seen, going Fischer-plus and getting rid of the live audience altogether, putting the players in a glass room with one-way visibility, etc. Also, on the Dortmund model, what's to stop the confederate from leaving the playing hall and relaying the moves to the computer guy in the room?
Anyway, the World Cup idea of doing the delay with approximately five games in rounds 2 and 3 (I forget the figure for round 1) strikes me as nearly pointless. The overwhelming majority of potential cheaters can still cheat, if that's what they are inclined to do; if anything, it is the higher-rated players on the non-delayed boards who are at a potential competitive disadvantage thanks to this practice.
(3) Miroshnichenko vs. Sutovsky. Emil Sutovsky's commentary stint ended with the round 3 tiebreaks, but the nine days he worked with Evgeny Miroshnichenko were often very uncomfortable to watch, primarily due to "Miro". Maybe Sutovsky did something to really bother him once upon a time, but it was often unpleasant to watch as Miroshnichenko would direct all sorts of snide and sarcastic remarks at Sutovsky. Maybe it was supposed to come across as good-natured ribbing, but most of the time it seemed like passive-aggressive sniping. It abated somewhat the last few days, perhaps because quite a few other people noticed it and they were told by the organizers to knock it off. Is there more to the story - or maybe, less to it?
Comment away.