Bobby Fischer (a winning portrayal by Tobey Maguire) once quit a world championship because he figured out that the Soviets were playing a team game to make it statistically impossible for Fischer to claim the championship. If, we can argue with sufficient weight to the counterfactual, his opponents had played fair games, he could have gone on to be the youngest world chess champ ever.
And then years later, when he's again beginning to dream of a world championship, he threatens his lawyer that he wouldn't play if he wasn't going to be paid obscene amounts of money. Fantastical....