Chess cases of fraud

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Chess cases of fraud are cases in which others in the chess world have been deliberately deceived. Chess players attempted to gain an advantage over others by pretending to be false or using unauthorized aids. It does not have to be fraud in the legal sense.

Types of Fraud

Electronic aids for chess tournaments

The prohibition of electronic aids in chess tournaments results from Articles 12.3a and 12.3b of the FIDE Chess Rules, which prohibit the use of records and analyzes of the position of the game on other chessboards and the carrying of electronic communication devices that are not switched off. In accordance with Articles 12.7 and 13.4 of the Laws of Chess, the referee has a discretionary scope for violations, from a warning to the exclusion of the tournament, whereby in the event of a disruption by electronic communication devices, the loss of the game or in the case of a position that the opponent cannot win (e.g. if he only has the king a dead position has arisen) the draw is mandatory.

  • The amateur Clemens A. is said to have cheated at the Böblinger Open in 1998 by having trains transmitted to him using a mini-earphone hidden under long hair . His tournament performance was far above the result that would have been expected based on his DWZ , and the moves played could be reconstructed with Fritz . He also made himself suspicious by announcing a mate in eight moves to the grandmaster Sergei Kalinitschew in the last round, something that human players could hardly have foreseen . A. won the tournament and 1660 DM in prize money. While a public prosecutor's investigation was set, the Bavarian Chess Federation excluded A. from the association.
  • An amateur player cheated at an open in 2002 by using Pocket Fritz in the toilet to analyze a game in progress. The vertigo was exposed when the referee investigated the suspicion and looked over the toilet wall.
  • Two cases occurred at the 2006 World Open in Philadelphia. One player used an earphone that he passed off as a hearing aid . Another player with a rating of 2169, who won against Grandmaster Ilia Smirin , among others , wore an eye-catching hat. At the direction of the tournament management, he had to play in the last two rounds without headgear and lost both games.
  • The Indian player Umakant S. , who increased his Elo rating within a year and a half from 1930 to 2484, was banned from the Indian Chess Federation for 10 years in December 2006. He was proven to have hidden a Bluetooth receiver under a hat at a tournament in New Delhi .
  • The French international Sébastien Feller was banned for several years along with Arnaud Hauchard and Cyril Marzolo because they are said to have used unauthorized help at the 2010 Chess Olympiad in Khanty-Mansiysk . According to the French Chess Federation, Marzolo analyzed the game in progress and sent the moves via SMS to the captain of the French Olympic team Hauchard, who in turn sent the moves to the player Feller using agreed signals. Feller announced his appointment and took part in the European Championship at the end of March 2011.
  • In the last round of the 2011 German chess championship, one player noticed that his opponent, the FIDE master N., was visiting the toilet unusually often. After two unsuccessful attempts to find out the reasons for this himself, the player informed a referee who checked the opponent's pockets at the end of the game and discovered a smartphone with a position from the previously ended game. As a result, N. admitted to using the smartphone for game analysis. On the basis of several testimonies it is assumed that N. had also used unauthorized aids in previous rounds, which is why not only the game was counted as lost for N., but also the IM norm that was safe before the game was revoked .
  • During the Dubai Open in April 2015, Georgian player Gajos Nigalidze used a smartphone that he had hidden in the wastebasket of a toilet to analyze a game in progress. He was then excluded from the tournament. In December 2015, FIDE revoked his grandmaster title and also imposed a three-year ban.
  • Grandmaster Igor Rausis was caught in a smartphone fraud in July 2019 and then declared the end of his career. It is still unclear whether his significant increase in performance in the previous years was entirely unlawful.

Violations of rules during individual chess games

During a game, incorrect moves are occasionally withdrawn. A problem of proof often arises if the player in question denies having already let go of the figure or invokes the J'adoube rule. If no referee is present, there is usually a testimony against a testimony. Well-known cases at the grandmaster level are:

  • Milan Matulović in his game against István Bilek at the Sousse interzonal tournament in 1967. Bilek's protest was dismissed and the game ended in a draw.
  • Viktor Korchnoi took back a move in a losing position against Josip Rukavina in the 1973 Leningrad interzonal tournament and played another. The referee then assessed the game as lost for Korchnoi, without waiting to see whether his opponent would have given the single mate.
  • World chess champion Garry Kasparov in his game against Judit Polgár in Linares 1994. The violation of the rules was only documented beyond doubt after the end of the game that Kasparov had won.
  • Zurab Asmaiparashvili against Vladimir Malachov at the European Championships in Istanbul 2003. This case is remarkable because Malachov agreed to withdraw the train. This was seen partly as a fair gesture, but partly also as unsportsmanlike behavior, as the outcome of the game also influenced the placement of uninvolved players.

Manipulated tournaments and game arrangements

  • One of the most common, but difficult to prove, fraud cases is the “selling” of individual lots. A documented suspected case occurred at the 5th US Championship in New York in 1880. According to the player Preston Ware , his opponent of the last round, James Grundy , offered him $ 20 for a draw before the start of the game . In contrast to Ware, Grundy still had a chance of winning the tournament and prize money. Ware said he accepted the offer and made no move to play for a profit in the game. Grundy for his part did not stick to the alleged agreement and took advantage of his opponent's weak game to win. The case came before the tournament court. Since Grundy denied everything and therefore testimony against testimony, the result remained.
  • After the Candidates Tournament in 1962 , Bobby Fischer raised the charge that the Soviet players had increased their chances against non-Soviet players by agreeing games with one another. This led to the fact that later candidate tournaments were no longer held as round-robin tournaments, but as duels. In 2006, scientists at Washington University in St. Louis carried out a statistical analysis of the results of the qualifying tournaments for the World Chess Championship from 1940 to 1964 and came to the conclusion that there was a 75 percent probability for this hypothesis.
  • It happens again and again that entire tournaments are invented that apparently did not take place at all. The results allegedly achieved there are then used by some players to improve their Elo number or to achieve title norms . Sensational recent examples include the “Kali Cup” in Hungary in 2004 and the “Heroes of Chernobyl” tournament in Ukraine in 2005.
  • The Romanian businessman Alexandru Crișan came through rigged tournaments, the games of which were never published, to an Elo rating of 2635, which would have made him one of the 50 best players in the world. In July 2001, Crișan took part in a grand master’s tournament in Portorož and only scored half a point from nine games, which corresponds to an Elo performance of 2130. In September 2001, FIDE Crişan revoked all titles and its Elo rating.

Imposture

  • One of the earliest allegations concerned the Arab Schatrandsch player Sa'id bin Jubair (665-714). He mastered the blind game without a blindfold with his eyes turned away, although it remained unclear whether he had perfected this skill in the dungeon or, as critics claimed, had seen the position with a small mirror.
  • Gerhard Stadelmaier and Raimondas Senkus, among others, fooled the chess composition world with plagiarized pieces for years until 1992. Stadelmaier was active in the 1980s and Senkus in the early 1990s. Reflections of the compositions and, in the case of Stadelmaier, post-processing after rotations were typical, which made the previous search more difficult. Stadelmaier was exposed in 21 of 35 compositions by the beginning of 1987 with the help of the Albrecht collection .
  • In 2004 Claus-Peter S. claimed, among other things, to have taken part in international chess composition solving tournaments. He was voted Sportsman of the Year 2004 by the readers of the Ostsee-Zeitung and received more than 6,000 euros for an alleged trip to the Olympic Games in Athens. Names and organizations named by him turned out to be unknown in problem chess and could not be proven.

Consequences

As early as the 18th century, Benjamin Franklin warned in his essay The Morality of the Game of Chess to observe ethical guidelines during the game of chess, in which disturbing the opponent and disregarding the rules of the game are prohibited. When the World Chess Federation FIDE was founded in 1926, similar points were included in the official chess rulebook, which standardized the punishment of misconduct.

FIDE passed further ethical guidelines in 1989, which were amended in 1996. Attempts at fraud can then be sanctioned with bans of up to three years. However, ChessBase employee André Schulz criticizes the fact that referees from the World Chess Federation are poorly or not at all prepared for fraud with electronic aids.

The constant further development of chess programs for handheld computers , mobile telephones and similar devices represents an incentive to use such aids in tournament games. For this reason there is now a nationwide ban on cell phones at chess tournaments. Although the proven (or even halfway justified) suspected cases are extremely rare, this creates an atmosphere in which surprisingly good performances by lower-rated players are viewed with suspicion. Such a case occurred, for example, at the “Lichtenberger Sommer” tournament in 2003. It was also extensively commented on in the magazine Schach , but ultimately had no consequences because the suspicion could not be substantiated.

In January 2012 the German Chess League decided to change its tournament rules, according to which a player has to present his mobile phone to the referee for a check if there is justified suspicion and also allow his pockets to be checked.

In order to prevent players from being assisted by helpers with computers outside the tournament hall, the games are not broadcast live in some tournaments, but with a time lag of up to 15 minutes on the Internet.

Chess server operators regularly disqualify players whose games are found to be too similar to computer moves. Bullet chess is becoming more and more popular because, due to the short thinking time, it is almost impossible to consult a chess program on the side.

It is very detrimental to the public image of the sport of chess if it makes the headlines as a result of fraud affairs. On the other hand, the above-mentioned case of "Claus-Peter S." and similar incidents are evidence of how little the public and even the press know about chess life.

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See FIDE rules of chess, for download, for example, as a PDF file from the German Chess Federation at http://www.schachbund.de/satzung-ordnung.html?file=files/dsb/ordnung/FIDERegeln2014-ger.pdf
  2. ↑ Hartmut Metz: With the license to cheat, chess column, www.scrkuppenheim.de, January 1999
  3. ↑ Hartmut Metz: Der Fall A. , Schachkolumne, www.scrkuppenheim.de, February 2000
  4. ↑ Hartmut Metz: How to really shit in the toilet , Schachkolumne, www.scrkuppenheim.de, January 11, 2003
  5. ↑ Robert Desjarlais: Counter Play. Berkeley 2011. pp. 175 f.
  6. ↑ Rating Progress Chart , FIDE, ratings.fide.com (English; rating development in the FIDE database)
  7. ↑ Umakant Sharma banned for 10 years , The Hindu, December 27, 2006 (English)
  8. ^ Thomas Strobl: Harsh penalties for three master players in France , German Chess Federation, April 1, 2011
  9. ^ A b André Schulz: Feller, Natsidis and the threat to tournament chess . ChessBase.de, June 22, 2011. Accessed March 8, 2012
  10. ↑ KARL 2/2011, pp. 9-10.
  11. ↑ Albert Silver: Nigalidze stripped of GM title, receives 3 year ban , Chessbase.com, December 26, 2015
  12. ↑ https://chess24.com/en/read/news/gm-igors-rausis-allegedly-caught-cheating
  13. ↑ Paul Tröger : From bucks and fat dogs . Bamberger Schachverlag 1984. pp. 87-88.
  14. ↑ The Kasparov touch-move controversy , in Judit Polgar: History, photos and games of the greatest Woman Chessplayer ever , www.controltheweb.com (English)
  15. ^ Gene H. McCormick, Andy Soltis: The US Chess Championship, 1845-1985 . McFarland, Jefferson 1986. pp. 36 f.
  16. ^ Charles C. Moul, John V. Nye: Did the Soviets Collude? A Statistical Analysis of Championship Chess 1940–64 , Social Science Research Network, May 2006 (English)
  17. ↑ Title fraud (with FIDE decision on the Kali Cup 2004, English), ChessBase Nachrichten, March 3, 2006
  18. ↑ The fake Heroes of Chernobyl , Chess News, ChessBase.com, May 3, 2005 (English)
  19. ↑ Leontxo Garcia: Crisan, the swindler from the Carpathian Mountains , ChessBase News, July 11, 2001
  20. ↑ Milan Vidmar Memorial, 3 / 7-11 / 7/2001, Portoroz - Slovenia (tournament table), www.chess.gr, July 2001
  21. ↑ http://de.chessbase.com/post/fide-kongre-beschle
  22. ↑ Michael Negele: Echolot: In the realm of the blind . Publication in chess 04/2014; Reprinted on the DBSB website, accessed on May 25, 2014
  23. ↑ On Stadelmaier see: Hans-Dieter Leiß: Der Fall Stadelmaier . Die Schwalbe 103, February 1987. pp. 185-189.
  24. ↑ Köpenick is located in Stralsund , ChessBase Nachrichten, April 12, 2005
  25. ↑ FIDE Code of Ethics ( Memento of December 19, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) , FIDE, www.fide.com (English)
  26. ↑ Harald Fietz: Under observation , chess column, Internet presence of Rochade Kuppenheim, September 2003
  27. ↑ Paragraph 5.3.4 of the tournament regulations for the German Chess League ( Memento from June 17, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 54 kB)
  28. ↑ Cheating in chess: the problem won't go away , Chessbase.com, March 30, 2011

literature

  • KARL. The cultural chess magazine , issue 1/2013, focus: fraud.
  • Ingo Althöfer and Roland Voigt: Chapter 14 in "Games - Riddles - Numbers", Springer Spectrum, 2014.

Web links