I think you might want to read the rules of chess tournaments. You will quickly realise that in fact Magnus doesn’t have a choice of who he plays against and can’t actually resign for no reason.
I am not insinuating anything. I am stating that tournaments have rules which include a format – determining which player another player encounters – and sportsman behaviours and terms of play. Most were put in place to avoid players throwing games to get more rest and avoid collusion.
For exemple, Carlsen had to play at least one move for the game not to be forfeited and I’m fairly sure he is running afoul a sportsman behaviour rules by resigning on move one but the tournament isn’t pressing because he is Magnus.
I'm not sure about the specifics of chess, but in most other kinds of competitions there are either explicit rules against or implicit agreements not to resign too early, i.e. throwing the match. If you resign when you are not actually losing, you are advantaging your opponent over all other players in the tournament (this matters a lot for tournaments with round-based elimination).
That reason makes sense, and there are certainly rules in tournaments against early draws, but I'd never heard of a rule against resigning early. My understanding of Magnus playing one move was that you couldn't resign until the game started, so he just started the game and resigned immediately, but maybe that's mistaken.
I guess it hasn't come up much since the personal loss of losing a game is usually pretty great at a high level. Maybe we'll see such rules after Magnus' resignation.
I agree with you, and I think throwing the game against Hans was poor form. My point was just that he has the right not to enter future tournaments to which Hans is invited.
