The Concavity cabinet; Clipperton (p. 408)
players who’d had the misfortune to draw and meet Eric Clipperton and Clipperton’s well-oiled Glock 17, and who understandably declined to be the player to cause Clipperton to eliminate his own map for keeps in public for something as comparatively cheesy as a tournament win over Clipperton. A win over Clipperton had no meaning because a loss to Clipperton had no meaning and didn’t hurt anybody’s regional and U.S.T.A. ranking, not once the guys in the U.S.T.A. computer center caught on to the Clipperton strategic M.O.
Context
One page after the Gentle headline, the idiom lands on the boy it allegorizes: the Clipperton Brigades decline to make him "eliminate his own map for keeps in public." And the second sentence quietly opens the theme's other front — the U.S.T.A. computer simply stops counting his matches, so wins and losses against him have "no meaning": the ranking-map gets edited to un-happen what occurs on the actual court, the exact inversion that will kill him at p. 433.