A long time ago there was this thing called correspondence chess. As I mentioned, I gave up long before I needed to, anticipating that use of computers would aid cheaters more than honorable players. There were also play by mail strategy games, with their own dedicated groups of players. There was even a method to play the Avalon Hill and SPI board games by mail, usually involving stock market price digits for the rolling of dice (e.g. last digit of Upjohn on Monday the 14th) so there’s a verifiable source. Who knew that gematria would steal this idea of assigning importance of a stock price decades later?
But we demand instant gratification and that was too slow. And as a game with rigid rules, and long ways away from the go to computer in your pocket we have no, the cheater needed some way to cheat while getting their immediate gratification fix.
Chess has its version of throwing a boxing match, and there and other contests call it sandbagging. You would play at nearby local tournaments. Throw in occasional, purposeful bad moves and lose on purpose. The idea is that your rating (Google FIDE rating)is artificially lowered and you are playing against weaker competition. Chess tournaments almost always lump competitors for prize money into sections of relatively close playing strength, so much weaker players have a chance to compete for real money.
This method didn’t do much good for the top players traveling around for the bigger prize money tournaments. A grandmaster already went through the vetting process of becoming titled and it would be way too obvious that they were now a below average player by rating now, while having been a grandmaster a year early. Still, this was common enough to ruin people’s enjoyment who wanted the competition more than the money. And accusations, imagined and with a factual basis abounded. Similarly, there’s an unwritten rule of agreeing to a quick draw between higher strength opponents to allow the weaker player to progress to international master or grand master status. The not chess example here is the sumo wrestling section in of the documentary Freakonomics. More notable, is the atmosphere surrounding when Bobby Fischer was making his push for the world champion title and dealing with the domination of a strong corps of Soviet players that suspiciously seemed to not play for victory versus beach other over and over again.
But this is more about the lure of high profile tournament cheating and the creative ways this was accomplished as well as notable accusations that weren’t true.
One rule that cheaters still get a lot of mileage out of abusing today is chess’s touch-move rule. I have been the victim of this back at the local club, although I still won the game. The only people that knew my opponent touched his knight then changed his mind were me and him. So the tournament director ruled in the other guy’s favor with no proof. In 1994 the reigning world champion changed his mind and got away with it, because his opponent didn’t follow the rule of complaining about it immediately. Since these were high profile players at the time the event was recorded. Cheaters who abuse this now rely on how if you’re playing a tiny tournament with no serious prize money, there aren’t going to be cameras around.
Way back in the 18th century there was a fake computer called The Turk. The ancient equivalent of the computer in your pocket, I suppose. There was a small person hidden in the box that was the “machine” who was a talented player. This certainly wasn’t common. That’s way too much effort to go through. As a more doable method, there was the various ways of colluding that were developed. Weak player at the board receives a signal from strong player not at the board.
The strong player, whether it’s their own brain or the computer in the pocket, finds a high quality move and a signaling system to relay that move to the weaker player at the board. Major tournaments now try to enforce standards on what the audience is allowed to do. For a not chess example, think of the Who Wants To Be a Millionaire coughing scandal or the episode of Monk about the cheating, murdering game show contestant.
That’s foreshadowing some of the background for the recent cheating controversies. It gets a bit more problematic to attempt these things while surrounded by a lot of people with superior pattern recognition skills.
In 2017 a strong GM took advantage of the pawn promotion rules. Chess sets now provide an extra queen since pawn promotion to a queen is far more common than any other promotion. The cheater hid his opponent’s extra queen. And with time running out the victim used an upside down rook as substitute for the missing queen, a common practice in years past. The rule that was enforced was the victim had promoted to a rook, the victim lost. The video evidence presented was denied. And I’m sure he’s pissed about it to this day. Although note that’s my opinion and it still is regarded as a controversy instead of a definite case.
But by far the computer in the pocket is the go to cheat. It’s just way too easy. And if you have any common sense and critical thinking skills at all you can see that the substantial number of OTB computer aided cheating events that are known show the lure of cheating when one is hiding far away with nobody able to view your surroundings.
Naturally, the bathroom is the perfect spot. There’s an expectation that you have some privacy when a call to nature arises. The Wikipedia article on chess cheating with a computer is practically a novel in length. And lots of toilets are involved. High profile tournaments waved the white flag about self governed fair play long ago. Players are even subjected to a metal detector prior to playing. And you need a convenient spot to hide your trusty super powered computer. The paranoia over hiding your computer near the toilet has also helped the false accusation theories.
The most famous incident is probably the so called Toiletgate scandal of 2006 where Vladimir Kramnik was accused of cheating by peeing a lot. While nowhere near the shenanigans of the Karpov-Korchnoi matches of the 1980’s it did make the national news. At least now the use of the toilet has fallen out of favor. Now the false accusations are getting more creative. Before we get to the big one in the next post I offer the example of Anna Rudolf. Supposedly she had a chess computer in her lip balm.
Now I don’t know about the accuser’s state of mind at the time. But it sure seems to me that hiding a chess computer in a lip balm dispenser is thoroughly impractical. How you would but the input into the tiny machinery, how you would read the display output on that tiny machinery, how you would do this with your tiny machinery still in view of your opponent, so many questions. We’re firmly in the territory of bizarre baseless conspiracies. This will be a lot of fun when we get to the sex toy stuff next.
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